THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 



SAVAGE 



The pole-star may be clouded for a time, but it is never lost 



BOSTON : 

GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET 
1885 



COPYRIGHT, 
BY GEORGE H, ELLIS, 
1885. 

Transfer 
Engineers School Liby. 

June 29^331 



± 




2Do 0^. i?. f ♦ 

My dear Friend, — Begun in narrowness and fear, and gradu- 
ally broadening toward a universality of trust and hope, I love to 
trace in the evolution of my own personal religious life a parallel 
(in little, for the same laws are seen in dew-drop and planet) to 
the larger unfolding of the religious life of the world. 

You are a part of my memories of childhood and youth. You 
stand beside me in the larger trusts and hopes of manhood. 

It is a pleasure, then, to link with your name some- of the 
fruits of that development in which we both have shared. 



M. J. S. 



PREFACE 



This volume contains a series of sermons preached in the 
regular course of my last winter's work. All but one of them 
was spoken, not written ; and they are now published from the 
stenographer's notes. 

They do not, then, pretend to be a complete treatise on their 
subject. They have the limits of their method and their imme- 
diate aim. But, having reason to believe they were helpful to 
many, as preached, I send them out to preach again, in another 
form and to another audience. 

The statement of a few strongly held behefs will show the 
stand-point of this book : — 

1. I believe that religion is a permanent element in human 
life. 

2. I believe it to be the most important of human interests. 

3. It is being neglected or opposed, because those who claim 
to be its special exponents and guardians identify its essence with 
its clothing, and so refuse to recognize the changed conditions 
of the modern world. 

4. I hold, then, that the grandest service a religious teacher 
can render his age is this : to show how religion persists through 
all changes of thought and life ; and, instead of dwindling and 
dying out, how it ever expands, to match the grander universe 
revealed by modern investigation. 

5. This is true faith. To fear that by recognizing his real 
universe God is in danger of being lost, this is infidelity. 

So believing, I wish to do what I can, not to save religion, — 
truth is never in danger, — but to help bewildered men and women 
to find it. 

M. J. S. 

Boston, September, 1885. 



CONTENTS 



I. What is Religion ? 9 

II. Comfort and Hope 24 

III. Religious and Ethical Sanctions 39 

IV. Personal Religion 58 

V. Inner Life and Outer 72 

VI. Evil and Growth 87 

VII. Belief and Truth 102 

VIII. The Growth of Secularism 118 

IX. Modern Saints 134 

X. The Communion of Saints 151 

XL Contemporary Religious Changes 166 

XII. The Religious Outlook 183 

XIII. Evolution and Immortality 199 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 



Three or four evenings ago, I had a long and intensely 
interesting conversation with a young man of this city, one 
highly educated and more than usually thoughtful. After 
discussing questions of poetry, of criticism, philosophy, 
ethics, and political economy, we naturally drifted on to 
the subject of religion. For some years, he has not been a 
regular church attendant anywhere, and the question came 
up, Why ? Not that I was asking him to attend this church ; 
for that is something I have never yet asked of any man or 
woman. But I was anxious to find out how he was looking 
at this question of the modern world. After giving me his 
own opinions, he said that he had a large number of acquaint- 
ances, — young men, educated, thoughtful, earnest, not given 
to any frivolous or light way of life, much less to vicious 
courses, but deeply absorbed in study, in thought, in investi- 
gation, getting ready, as they say, to grapple with the prob- 
lems of practical hfe. If asked whether they go to church, 
the reply is : " No ; I have no time for church. Religion does 
not appeal to my sense of what is practical and real." They 
look upon it as something that is being outgrown. 

A few days earlier than this, I was talking with an intelli- 
gent and finely educated young lady, not in Boston; and she 
expressed it as her conviction that educated, refined, and 
thoughtful people were coming more and more to feel that 
it is not worth their while to attend church ; that they look 
upon religion as something that does not touch their deepest 



/ 



lo TJie Religious Life. 

needs or highest thought and life. I suppose it is true that, 
if you should go through this city and converse with large 
numbers of intelligent business men, men of character, of 
standing, of integrity, and should ask them what they believe 
about religion, they would tell you, in many cases, that they 
did not know, or they would say in an off-hand sort of way, 
" I have no religion." They go to church, perhaps, because 
their wives do, and they do not like to sit at home and allow 
them to go alone ; or because they feel in some general way 
that it is better that the children should be brought up 
under some kind of religious influence ; or because their 
friends go and they are in this way brought into social 
contact with the society of some church; or perhaps they 
are interested in some particular minister, and, whether on 
Sunday or any other day, they like well enough to hear him 
talk. It is a change from the ordinary routine and wear of 
their business life. But they do not feel, in any deep sense, 
that they have any religion, or that religion is any deep and 
high thing that it is worth their while to have. 

It seemed to me, therefore, that it would be a practical 
thing for me to raise and try to answer the question. What 
is religion ? What is this thing that intelligent young men 
do not feel concerned about ? What is this thing that plain 
common-sense business men do not feel touched by, that 
does not appeal to their practical business sense ? What is 
this thing that is being more and more neglected, as some 
say, by the better classes of people 1 

As my method of answering this question, I want you to 
look with me at some widely different specimens of what 
has passed as religion in the world. I want you to look at 
people engaged in what they regard as religious services, and 
ask yourselves what it is that they are doing, or what they 
think they are doing. 



What is Religion ? 



II 



As the first and crudest specimen, let us take one of the 
lowest savage tribes that worship a fetich, — a stick, a stone, 
a serpent, or any object, no matter what. How do they 
worship it ? They bring it food ; they chant some rude 
strain of praise to the spirit supposed to reside in and pre- 
side over the object which to them is the symbol of some 
mysterious life. Perhaps they bring it flowers, or they kill 
some animal and burn it as a sacrifice ; or, perhaps, as in 
many cases it has been true, they mutilate their bodies or 
torture themselves in some way, in order to please this sup- 
posed deity. What is it that they are doing ? what do they 
think that they are doing 1 Why, they look upon this spirit 
as the power that is supreme over their individual lives and 
destinies, no matter how it has become so. It stands to 
them for our modern Infinite. It is the power that holds 
their destiny in its hands, and they are trying to do what 
they think this power wants them to do. They are trying to 
please it, to placate it, to get on the right side of it, to get 
into right relations to it. They are trying to do what Paul 
was aiming at, — be reconciled to their god. The method 
by which they think they can do it may be ever so crude to 
us, may be ever so cruel ; but that is what they seek. 

Let us take another specimen. You will remember, in the 
story of the flood, after the waters had abated and the ark 
had rested on the mountain, that Noah and his sons and 
their families came out of the ark and slaughtered certain 
kinds of animals and birds that they regarded as clean, and 
built a fire and burned them as a sacrifice to Jehovah ; and 
Jehovah is represented as being pleased. He is represented 
as being only a little way above them ; for he was so near 
that he smelled the odor of the burnt animals and birds, and 
was pleased by it. Naive and childish in the extreme the 
story seems to us. This God, but a little while before, was 



12 



The RcligiotLs Life. 



supposed to have created these animals and birds ; and one 
would have thought that he would have been a little tender 
about them, after he had made them. But no : he is de- 
lighted to have them killed. He likes to see their blood 
flowing, and takes pleasure in smelling the burnt offering; 
and, in consideration of this sacrifice, he promises to be kind 
to Noah and his descendants from that day forth. What 
did this mean ? They had precisely the same idea in mind 
as the fetich worshipper. They were trying to please God, 
to get into right relations to him, to become reconciled 
to him. 

Take another case. Come down to the city of Athens. 
See the greatest citizens of that ancient commonwealth, — at 
that time, the most civilized State on earth. Every day, they 
chose by lot certain men, whose business it was to go into 
the prytaneum at a certain hour, where the sacred fire was 
kept burning, and eat there a common meal, a sacrifice to 
the god represented by this fire. What are they trying to 
do ? Precisely the same thing that they are trying to do when 
they examine the entrails of victims on the eve of battle, or 
when they watch the course of birds flying through the air. 
They are trying to find out the will of the god, to please 
him, to get on the right side of him, to get him to be friendly 
to them, to become reconciled to him. 

Visit the city of ancient Mexico. You will find there, 
before the Spanish conquest, if you enter their central place 
of worship, a truncated pyramid dedicated to the service of 
a god well pleased with sacrifice. Many times, these people 
went to war with their neighbors for the sake of bringing 
home captives, that they might have them for the purpose of 
sacrificing them. From ten to twenty or thirty or a hundred 
of these captives, according to the majesty of the occasion, 
are slaughtered by the priest, till this truncated pyramid 



What is Religion ? 



13 



drips and flows with human blood. What are these men 
doing ? Are they purposely cruel ? No : they may love 
their wives and children, they may be kind and neighborly ; 
but, when this method of worship sprung up, it was a virtue 
th> hate an enemy, to hate and put to death a foreigner. And 
the god of this particular tribe — who originally, perhaps, had 
been a chieftain illustrious in war, who had imbrued his 
hands over and over again in the heart's blood of his 
enemies — will be delighted, they believe, to see the blood 
of his enemies still flowing. They are trying to do what 
all the rest have been aiming at, — to please their god, to do 
what they think he wants them to do. 

It is this, again, that the Jewish high priest was trying to 
do in the temple, when he entered into the holy of holies 
once a year, sprinkling it with the blood of the victim, and 
came forth to pronounce absolution on all the people gath- 
ered to receive with awe and submission his heaven-inspired 
words. They were trying to please God, to get into right 
relations to him, to become reconciled to him. 

And, when we come down to the majesty and magnificence 
of the Catholic ceremonial of the Middle Ages, what do we 
see ? Visit St. Peter's on some high festival day, and see the 
processions, the burning lights, hear the noble music chanted 
as a wail over the sins of the people or as a song of triumph 
at the sense of their having been forgiven ; and then, when 
the host is lifted up at last, — the veritable incarnation of God 
in the wafer, — and the people fall prostrate before it, what 
does it all mean ? What is it all for They seek the same 
thing precisely as was sought in all these other cases that 
I have spoken of. They are trying to please God, seeking, 
again, in ceremonial and ritual and sacrifice the truest way, 
as they suppose, of pleasing God. And, when all that had 
passed away and Protestantism was born, what was Calvin 



14 



The RcligioiLs Life. 



trying to do at Geneva, and Luther in Germany, and Knox 
in Scotland, and Wiclif in England ? What were they 
trying to do with their prayers and hymns and preaching, 
their baptism and Lord's supper? They were trying to 
please God according to their conception of him and what 
they supposed he wanted them to do, trying to get into 
right relations to him, to become reconciled to him. What 
were Channing and Parker, with their changed conceptions 
of God, of man, of Church and service, trying to do ? They 
were trying to please God according to their conception 
of him, trying to get into right relations with him, tr3ang 
to be reconciled to him. What is Mr. Felix Adler in his 
Ethical Society in New York, with his denial of any personal 
God, with his profound doubt of any future life, trying to do t 
He is trying to get into right relations with what he regards 
as the supreme governing power of the universe, trying to 
become reconciled with his moral ideal, trying to get into 
right relation with the controlling force of the world. It 
does not make any difference what you call it. What are 
Herbert Spencer and Huxley trying to do? Spencer has 
wrought out his magnificent scheme of philosophy, beginning 
with the nebulous vapor in the heavens, and tracing its con- 
densation into suns and planets ; then, the first dawn of life 
on the earth, tracing its course, as it develops, through 
physical, mental, moral, spiritual life, up to Jesus and Shak- 
spere and the grandest men of the world ; then, the organiza- 
tion of men into society ; then, the development through 
society of the moral purpose, the moral ideal, the dominant 
moral thought of the world. What is he after in all 
this ? He simply outlines his scheme of the universe, 
getting his science and his philosophy of this ultimate power 
manifested through all these ten thousand forms. The 
Mexicans had their science and philosophy, such as it was. 



What is Religion ? 



15 



Noah had his. The Athenians had theirs. The fetich wor- 
shippers had theirs. Herbert Spencer calls it, to-day, " be- 
coming adjusted to our environment " ; but this, which 
religion calls God, is the grandest part of our environment. 
The suns and the planets, the past history of the world, 
mountains and seas, the winds and the forests, human 
society, — all these, with their various manifestations, — art, 
science, and trade, education and government, — are only 
manifestations of this infinite and eternal power that religion 
has been calling God, and that Mr. Spencer refrains from 
naming, because he looks upon it as infinite and thinks 
no human name can cover or define it. But, after all,, he is 
trying to do precisely what the fetich worshipper was trying 
to do, what Noah, what the Mexican, the Athenian, the 
Catholic Church, the Protestant, Channing and Parker and 
Adler, have been trying to do. " Reconciled to God," says 
religion; "Adjusted to our environment," says Herbert 
Spencer, — the religious term and the scientific term for 
precisely the same thing. The only difference is the change 
in the thought and the development in the moral ideal 
of man, that has gone on from age to age, beginning on the 
far-off shore of some primeval ocean, and ending with the 
highest ideal of human civilization. 

But, say a great many, is it not now a matter of science 
and ethics, and no longer a matter of what used to be called 
religion ? and, therefore, is not the necessity for the Church, 
for religious organization, gone by } Is there any need for 
having a Church any longer, or of my going to church ? 

Let us look at this a moment. Just as fast as human 
society develops and men co-operate with each other, just 
so fast does the principle of organization in human affairs 
become more and more dominant and necessary. There is 
going to be more, rather than less, organization in the future. 



i6 



TJie Religious Life. 



Men organize for the purpose of government. They or- 
ganize scientific associations, art clubs, or for purposes of 
education. If there is something of a business nature that 
a man feels he cannot well attain alone, he combines with 
somebody else, and we have a business firm or a corporation. 
This is natural and wise. Should we not apply this principle 
in the sphere of religion as well as in other matters 1 It is 
not only true that the principle of organization which mani- 
fests itself in the church, the temple, the synagogue, no 
matter what you call it, is this simple, natural human thing ; 
but it is true that this organization has been in the past, is 
to-day, and, in spite of its faults and defects, must become 
more and more, in the future, the grandest and most in- 
clusive of all organizations. 

Let us institute two or three comparisons. I said that, in 
all these cases of which I have spoken, w^hen men have 
been engaged in these religious rites and services they have 
been trying to become reconciled to God, to become adjusted 
to their environment. What does that mean.-* Adjustment 
to one's environment means the condition of success, of 
happiness, of prosperit}^, of life. Men live, men prosper, 
men are happy, just in proportion as they are properly 
adjusted to the environment in which they live. Perfect 
reconciliation with God means perfect life, perfect happiness, 
perfect prosperity, perfect peace. Now, then, this search 
for God, this search for the truth in regard to man's environ- 
ment, whether you call it religious or scientific, is nothing 
more nor less than the search for the secret of life. 

Think what that means. Men great in their intelligence 
have, from the first, been searching after the secret of life, — 
more life, fuller life, higher life, happier life, better life. 
That is what they have been after. 

Now, what is science ? Science is simply man's search 



What is Religion ? 



17 



after truth within certain departments of life. It is some- 
thing subordinate to the rehgious search. The highest thing 
that science ever did or can do is to be the minister, the 
handmaid, of a true religion. It gives religion a ground- 
work, standing room, arms it with intelligence, lights its way 
that it may see the path of future progress. 

What is art 1 Art is only the embodiment on the canvas 
or in marble or in architecture, or in any department of life, 
of man's highest and noblest, most beautiful and inspiring 
thoughts. It is only a department of life ; while religion 
is life itself. Art, then, can never do any more than adorn 
and assist a true conception of religion. The same is true 
of education ; the same is true of government and of busi- 
ness and of every occupation in which man can engage. 
These are ministers, helps, toward life ; while religion, rightly 
conceived, is life itself. 

If this is true, we need now to consider how it has come 
to pass that such strange misconceptions of this truth have 
become popular. How does it happen that the young man 
to whom I have referred could speak in this way, and that 
his companions could speak of religion as something no 
longer practical, that does not touch the deepest and highest 
life, that can be neglected for more important affairs 1 It 
has come about in one of the most natural ways in all the 
world. There is nothing more common among men than 
the perpetual mistaking of means for ends. People are 
doing it, not only in religion, but everywhere else. A man 
starts out on a business career. If he stops and thinks of it, 
he knows that the only object of doing business at all is to 
obtain means to minister to life. But the chances are, nine 
times out of ten with the ordinary run of men, that the 
business will master them ; and the end is sacrificed to the 
means. Take a house. A house is made to live in. The 



i8 



The Religious Life, 



one object of the house is to furnish shelter for companion- 
able, comfortable, easy, joyous life ; but we have seen no 
end of houses where either husband or wife, by some hard 
and fast rule, so manages the home that happiness, comfort, 
and peace are sacrificed. They act on the principle that the 
family is made for the method of housekeeping, instead of 
the housekeeping for the family. They sacrifice the end to 
the means. Take it in education. We have some good 
illustrations of this principle in our Boston public schools, 
and in some private ones, too, perhaps. Education is in- 
tended to draw out the aptitudes and powers of the chil- 
dren ; but we have established a machine method, and the 
children must be sacrificed to that. If they cannot conform 
to it, why, then, so much the worse for the children. The 
method of education is infallible, whether it produces the 
best results or not. 

So in regard to the church. People can very easily 
become attached to a particular building or location or way 
of preaching, and sacrifice to that the prosperity and the 
power and the future of the organization itself, which is the 
soul, of which the other is only the shell. So this is not 
peculiar to religion : it is common enough in all other depart- 
ments of life. But it works in general in this way. People 
become attached to a certain form or method of the religious 
life that has become instituted ; and so they are ready to 
sacrifice religion itself and its future and its power in the 
world, for the sake of this institution. Let us see how this 
has come about. A good many years ago, a certain religion, 
we will say, a certain form, became established. At the time 
of its birth, — mark you this, — it represented the best thought, 
the highest feelings and moral impulses, and the grandest 
ritual that the people were capable of developing at that 
time ; and it had for its purpose this one search for life, for 



What is Religion ? 



19 



the secret of life, — reconciliation to God, adjustment to 
human environment. It became established. Money was 
invested in it. A hierarchy sprang up in connection with it, 
so that it possessed immense power over the world. There 
was a field in it for the gratification of human ambition. 
It became a repository' and dispensatory of honors and 
emoluments of every kind. It became established in the 
interest of the people, and entwined with their reverence 
and sentiment. They believed that it represented the per- 
fect, the eternal thought and wish of their God. But do 
you not see the absurdity of any such institution as this 
ever coming into existence and remaining forever un- 
changed ? This is a growing humanity, and this is an infinite 
universe ; and, however much we grow, there will always be 
more beyond us than there is behind. Unless we cease to 
grow, anything that we attempt will become antiquated, in 
view of the larger thought and nobler feeling and better 
method of service ; while the hope, the purpose, will remain 
unchanged forever. 

Now let us see the interests that are engaged in this insti- 
tution and that are opposed to change. The ministers, all 
its officials, all those that live by it, will feel as the ministers 
and officials of the temple in Jerusalem did : they will be 
outraged, as they were at Jesus, at any word spoken against 
the institution. They will fight for it with all their power 
and all the indignation of their nature, and think they 
are even fighting for God himself. Then there are large 
masses of people, always, who take their opinions second- 
hand, that are only echoes of the supposed authorities of the 
time. Of course, they will be alarmed at any threat of disso- 
lution or change ; and they will join the clamor and outcry 
against those that dare speak a word against that which has 
stood for ages as the symbol of the divine. Then there is a 



20 



The Religions Life. 



large class of those who do not care much about anything : 
they have no special opinions, no sacred convictions to be 
troubled. They like to live a comfortable life and are will- 
ing to conform to the dominant rule of the time, and do not 
wish to be disturbed or troubled; and they resent as an inter- 
ference any suggestion to readjust their opinions or to lead 
a higher life. Then there is a class of people, like this 
young man, who are persuaded that religion is antiquated, 
outgrown, who have been hearing all their lives that the 
institution was identical with religion itself ; and now at last 
they come to believe that this institution is discredited and 
is going to pieces. But they do not care, they will not fret. 
They believe in it no longer ; so they propose to let it alone 
and let it go, thinking that, when it goes, religion will go. 
But they say : We have science and education and art left. 
If religion is dying, let it die : we care nothing about it. 
They have taken the authorities of the religious institution at 
their word, and have supposed that the institution was identi- 
cal with religion, and have been willing to see it pass away. 

There are only a few, the remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls 
them, in any age, who see that the outward form is not the 
thing, and that, while the outward form is getting ready to 
fall and become a thing of the past, are quietly and out 
of sight laying the foundations for the new and larger temple 
that shall be ready to receive the homeless thousands, when 
the old is gone. These are the men that read the meaning 
of the age, that understand the changes that must be the 
result of the process of human growth. 

Now let me indicate what it is that is going on. What is 
taking place when the old form of religion is passing away 
and the new is coming as a substitute ? Take religion apart. 
Consider the two or three elements of which it is composed. 

Religion is, first, thought. Every religion starts with the 



What is Religion I 



21. 



best science of the age. There are people who think that it 
is something against rehgion to-day that it talks about sci- 
ence. The Bible begins with science. The first word is 
science. Every religion begins with science, a scheme of 
the universe, a theory of the world, of God, of man, and of 
their relations to each other. Religion then goes on to find 
out what the relations ought to be ; it tries to realize this 
07ight That is what every religion does. But, when the 
world has become wiser, the old scheme is discredited and 
passes away ; and we get a new science, a larger, broader, 
deeper conception of things, wrought out of human experi- 
ence and study. We get a "new heaven and a new earth"; 
and the first heaven and the first earth pass away, and are 
seen no more. But religion does not pass away. The creed 
changes and a new creed gradually takes its place, — a broader 
creed, that is all. 

What next ? The next element is the feeling, the emo- 
tional side of religion ; and that depends entirely upon the 
thought. If a man thinks his god is cruel, he will be afraid 
of him. If he thinks he is kindly, he will feel tender and 
loving toward him. He will do what he thinks he wants 
him to do. Of necessity, the emotions that one must feel 
are shaped by the thought, the creed. When the preed 
changes, of course the emotions change, too ; and a different 
class of feelings comes to predominate. If the thought is 
really larger, better, truer, the emotions will also be higher, 
better, more humane, as we actually do find them. 

Then there is the ritual element, that which passes under 
the name of service, prayer, processions, baptism, the Lord's 
supper, or what corresponds to these in any religion, sacri- 
fice, temples, architecture, — the whole outward embodiment 
of the religion. This is the ritual. Of course, it will be in 
accordance with the thought, and will endeavor to express 



22 



The Religions Life. 



the appropriate feelings that correspond with that thought. 
If, then, the thought changes, the method of service will 
also change, and become correlated with the new and higher 
thought. The creed, then, or the thought element; the 
emotional, or feeling, element ; the ritual, or external mani- 
festation of the thought and the feeling, — all change and 
pass away. They m.ust change and pass away, if the world 
grows and becomes wiser. The process may be slow ; but, 
so surely as the world grows, so surely will the thought, the 
feeling, and the ritual change. 

But what abides ? The heart, the soul, the purpose, this 
eternal search for the secret of life, this eternal endeavor to 
become adjusted to the environment, this eternal desire to 
become reconciled to God, to be adapted to the mental, 
moral, spiritual conditions of life, — 'these remain. These 
grow finer, sweeter, better, age after age ; and this purpose, 
this search, is the soul of religion. The change of thought, 
of feeling, of ritual, has no more relation to the life or the 
death of the soul than the change of a child's garments, as 
he grows from an infant in his mother's arms to a strong 
man, is an index that his life, instead of growing larger and 
deeper, is passing away. All these are only the clothing of 
religion. This purpose, this inspiration, this endeavor, — 
these are the heart and the soul. 

Let me sum up this morning's discussion in a few brief 
and numbered points : — 

1. Religion is not passing away and is not going to pass 
away. 

2. If any man thinks it is, that simply means that he has 
misconceived the course of human history, has used false 
definitions, or else that he is incompetent to comprehend the 
forces at work and the direction in which they tend. 

3. A change in the thought of the world, increasing intelli- 



What is Religion ? 



23 



gence, can only, in the nature of things, give us a higher and 
nobler religious creed. 

4. A change in the emotions and feelings that ac- 
company religion and give expression to its life, as the 
world grows wiser and better, can, in the nature of things, 
only become higher, finer, nobler, sweeter, and more hu- 
mane. 

5. These changes that are going on can only ultimate 
in the enrichment of the ritual manifestation of religious 
life. It took some hundreds of 5^ears after Christianity was 
born before the great chants, the rich rituals and services 
of the Church came into existence. You must not wonder 
if the child is born without clothes. You must give it time 
to become clothed. A new religious development must have 
time to clothe itself with its appropriate ritual life. 

6. This religious purpose, this aim and effort, remain the 
same age after age, only ennobled by the uplifting thought 
and feeling of man. 

7. Religion, as in the past, must also be in all coming 
time, not only an organized manifestation of human life, but 
the most inclusive of all organizations. Since it is the 
search for the secret of life, it must subordinate and include 
all other organizations, all other forms of human thought, 
feeling, and activity. When men think they are leaving 
religion and the divine, they would do well to remember the 
lines which Emerson puts into the mouth of his Brahma, — 

"They reckon ill who leave me out; 
When me they fly, I am the wings." 



COMFORT AND HOPE. 



My theme is "Comfort and Hope" as related to modern 
thought, and as to whether we are in danger of losing them. 
Men and wom.en naturally desire comfort and seek for it; 
and they wish to keep hopes at least as fair and bright as 
those of their youth and as those that have cheered them in 
the past. But there are thousands in Europe and America 
to-day who are at least afraid that the progress of human 
thought is seriously to interfere with their comfort, and that 
it threatens to diminish the brightness of their hope. 

Now, I believe that this search for comfort is not only 
instinctive and natural, but that it is altogether right, capable 
of being defended in the severest court of thought and in- 
vestigation. Men not only desire comfort, but they rightly 
desire it. They not only seek it, but, in so doing, whether 
they know it or not, they are seeking that which is essential 
as conditions of the highest and noblest human life. Men 
seek for physical comfort. Even inanimate things, if you 
disturb them^ keep on moving along what philosophers call 
the line of least resistance, until they come to a place of 
ease, of poise, once more. Let a person enter a room, and 
he will instinctively seek out the easiest chair in which to 
seat himself ; and, when he is seated, he will, without giving 
it a thought, assume the most restful position, — a position 
in which the blood can freely flow through the veins and 
arteries, in which the process of breathing is unimpeded, a 



Comfort and Hope. 



25 



position that does not disturb or interfere with any of the 
automatic functions of the physical Hfe ; and, in so doing, he 
is doing what he ought to do, — that which accords with the 
best conditions of physical life and health. 

So we naturally seek intellectual comfort. What is the 
object of all study, of all science and philosophy ? It is 
only to furnish us with satisfactory opinions, with satis- 
factory theories of God, of man, of destiny, in the midst of 
which we may in the easiest way lead our practical and suc- 
cessful lives. We instinctively seek for mental rest. If 
something occurs that a man cannot readily explain, he says, 
"I do not understand that " ; and, straightway, he is disturbed 
and troubled, and goes to work to find some explanation. 
And there is no mental rest for him until he finds it. It may 
not be the true one ; but it must appeal to what he thinks is 
common sense to be for the time satisfactory to him. Per- 
haps he will not even stop to see if he understands the 
explanation ; but, if he finds something that is satisfactory to 
his present state of mind, he has mental rest. To illustrate 
what I mean : The astronomers and scientists told us, a 
year ago, that those marvellous sunsets were caused by 
volcanic dust in the air. I suppose there was hardly one 
person in ten thousand who had the slightest idea of how 
the presence of volcanic dust in the air could produce such 
results ; but they accepted the explanation, and found a cer- 
tain sort of mental peace in it, comfort in knowing that, at 
last, the great mystery of the evening heavens was explained. 

And, just as they seek physical and mental comfort, so 
they seek comfort in their moral and spiritual nature, a place 
of rest, a basis for trust, an outlook for hope. This, too, is 
natural; and I am ready to say, further, that, if it be true that 
the discoveries of the modern world are, in the long run and 
on the whole, to take away that comfort from the highest 



26 



TJie Religions Life, 



thinkers and the noblest men and women, then this modern 
theory of things is doomed to fail. It can never take a 
permanent hold on human thought or the human heart. We 
not only desire comfort in this respect, but we ought to 
desire it; and no religious theory that does not furnish it 
can permanently maintain its sway over human life. 

But there is an important proviso to be considered just 
here. Let me talk for a while with a Catholic servant girl, 
who has no conception of the modern scientific theory of 
the universe, no conception of any modern thought about 
God or man or human destiny, who finds comfort only in 
the service of her Church, in the worship of the saints and 
of the Virgin, who finds rest from her petty daily trials and 
toils in going to the divine Mother, as she thinks, and lay- 
ing her burdens at her feet. She would find no comfort in 
that wdiich to me seems so unspeakably grander and nobler. 
Restless, homesick, dreary would all this w^orld seem to her, 
in which I live with daily comfort and unutterable hope. 
What does this mean ? It means that there are lower and 
higher grades of thought, stages of progress, in the world ; 
and that those in the lower must inevitably fail to see the 
grounds of comfort and the basis of rest and peace in the 
higher, until they are developed out of this lower condition 
into an apprehension of the higher, and have become intel- 
lectually, morally, and spiritually adjusted to this new and 
higher environment. 

These transition times are not comfortable. It is not 
pleasant to be driven out of a cosey place of rest and 
compelled to search for a new one, even though the new 
one, when found, be larger and finer and better in every 
way. The process of leaving the old and finding the new is 
not one of comfort. But the very desire for comfort, the 
very search for it, intelligently comprehended and held, may 



Comfort and Hope. 



27 



become a motive force for the endurance of the temporary 
discomfort for the sake of the other and better comfort to be 
attained. It is out of this consideration that springs, it 
seems to me, tlie common misconception concerning the 
nature of comfort and its relation to the truest human life. 
Many persons are ready to tell us that we have no right 
to seek comfort ; that there is something nobler than that 
to search for; that "necessity is the mother of invention" ; 
and that, had not this human race been pursued by a hard 
and relentless necessity through all the ages of the past, we 
should never have attained the grand things that constitute 
our modern civilization. All this is true ; but what is the 
interpretation of it ? It entirely concurs with the position 
we have taken. Necessity is the mother of invention. 
Make people uncomfortable in a certain set of circum- 
stances, and this discomfort becomes the motive force of a 
struggle for better things. The effort is not for the sake 
of effort, but for the sake of comfort ; and the result is a 
nobler, deeper, higher life, a grander peace, a better joy. 
If the necessity did not issue in a grander thing, it would 
be condemned as not only unavailing, but destructive. If 
unrest and discomfort issued in nothing higher and better, 
but became permanent, it would mean destruction to the 
entire race. We need comfort, then ; and we have a right 
to seek for it ; only we have no right to be contented with 
the lower forms of comfort, with a partial comfort, a comfort 
for the lower side of our being, when there is something 
higher and better to be attained by temporary discomfort, 
something that can be secured not only for ourselves, 
as though it were a personal thing, but something that 
can be attained for the race. 

Now, then, let us look at this problem of the relation of 
the comfort and hope of the old thought to the new. We 



28 



The Religious Life. 



have said that thousands of men and women in Europe and 
i\.merica are disturbed with the fear that the progress of the 
modern world means destruction of their comfort and taking 
away of their hope. Let us, then, look for a little at the old 
comfort and the old hope in connection with the inevitable 
conditions attached to them. Let us get the price that an 
intelligent man would be obliged to pay for the old comfort 
and the old hope. Let us see if he would be even willing to 
take these, if he could, on the necessary conditions attached 
to them. Let us see if he could find real comfort in the old 
comfort and real hope in the old hope. 

The comfort and hope of the old theology grouped them- 
selves mainly around two beliefs : a belief in the conception 
of God, which was held for ages, and that is outlined in 
all the old orthodox theology; and the hope of a future 
life, as it was also outlined in this old theology. Let us see 
what these two beliefs were. Let us see the price that 
modern man would have to pay for holding them, — the 
price of character, the price of intelligence, — and see if he 
would be willing to take the comfort and the hope on the 
inexorable and inevitable terms. 

What about God ? I grant you that there was, on one side 
of it, great comfort and peace in the thought that men used 
to hold concerning the nature and character of God. He 
was a being individualized, comprehensible, of whom a pict- 
ure — mental, at least — might be drawn. He was a being 
so much like a man that men and women could think of him 
under the form of human nature. They could think of him 
as so much like themselves that there was natural and inev- 
itable sympathy between him and themselves. They could 
go to him, tell him their wants, talk about their sorrows, lay 
down their burdens for a little while at his feet ; and, even if 
he bade them take them up again and carry them, they could 



Comfo7't and Hope. 



29 



believe that he knew and understood about them, and pitied 
them and would help them. All this is sweet and grand and 
noble. But let us glance at the character of this God as he 
is drawn in these theologies, which their makers claim to 
be transcripts of the revelation of God. 

According to them, he made this world a few thousand 
years ago ; he made a man and woman in his own likeness 
to be the progenitors of the human race, placed them in 
conditions where he not only knew that they would sin and 
fall, but he intended they should. It was foreordained from 
the foundation of the world. And then what ? He was angry 
with them for doing what he had made them to do. He 
drove them out with the curse on them that they should bear 
sorrow and till the ground in the sweat of their brow ; that 
they should wander, fearing and struggling in poverty and 
disease and pain through all their life, and become the pro- 
genitors of a race such as ours has been. 

And then what ? He left the great masses of humanity to 
wander in darkness without a ray of light or guidance from 
heaven, only sending his word and his help to one family 
selected from the rest by an arbitrary choice. And all 
through the ages there has been only this one little ray of 
light shining along the pathway of one family, of one people, 
of one religion ; while the great masses have been left to 
wander, to stumble and perish. 

And what else ? I have said that people supposed they 
could go to this God for comfort and help, tell him what 
they wanted, and get it. Yes, on one condition. Is this 
condition intellectually defensible ? Is it morally honorable ? 
This God had made no provision for anybody to come to 
him except a very few ; and on what terms could they come? 
They could come with hope, only if they happened to have 
been foreordained to be saved, only if they were of the num- 



30 



The RcligioiLs Life. 



ber of the elect, only if they had been converted, only if 
they felt the movement of the spirit in their souls. They 
could come even then, not because God was good simply, 
not because man's need was exigent simply : they could 
come only through the mediation of another. This picture 
of God represents him as an Oriental sultan, to be approached 
by grace of a court favorite ; as though our rulers at Wash- 
ington could not be touched by distress, could not be 
touched by the needs of the people, their ignorance or want, 
but only through the influences of the lobby. 

Can we take comfort in going to a God like that and on 
such. terms as that? I, for one, cannot. By as much as the 
world is developed intellectually, it cannot believe a theory 
like that. By as much as it is developed morally, it could 
not accept comfort and help on what I must pronounce 
immoral and dishonorable terms. 

Take now the hope of a future life. It used to be very 
dear and precious to me, — that dream that we read of in the 
marvellous Revelation of John, that beautiful city of God 
above the clouds, with its gates of pearls, its pavements of 
gold, its inhabitants always happy, their lips running over 
with song ; the streets of the city lined with the trees of life, 
bearing their fadeless leaves and fruit. And I used to 
dream of that city, and look forward to the time when I 
should go and join my friends therein. But as I have grown 
older, as I have thought of the conditions of that hope, as I 
have thought of the other side of that eternal life, I have felt 
that I could not accept the invitation, even though I stood 
on the threshold and God himself beckoned me in. For 
off yonder, under a cloud that never lifts, never shot through 
with a ray of the sunshine of hope, I am haunted with those 
white, pitiful faces, with pleading in their eyes and words of 
despair on their lips, their hands uplifted, but never meeting 



Comfort and Hope. 



31 



any response ; their lips parched with a thirst that shall never 
know a cooling drop of water ; their nerves thrilling with an 
agony, only to be increased age after age, filling up the 
whole measure of their capacity of pain. Can I take heaven 
on such terms as that ? No : I turn my back on the throne ; 
and, if I may, go down and help them bear their sorrows, if 
I may not free them from them. And can the developed 
heart of man, the high moral sense of the world, permanently 
take a hope of the future like that, and on such terms as 
that ? Can they find comfort in the hope of a future life for 
themselves, even though it be in heaven, on such terms as 
these ? If they become clear in their thought, they cannot 
believe it. If they become noble and unselfish in their 
hearts, they would reject it with scorn. By as much, then, 
as the world grows nobler and better, by so much must it 
surrender comfort and hope, if offered on terms like these. 

I, for one, am ready to say, weighing well my words, that 
I should consider that I had a thousand-fold more comfort 
and a nobler hope for a man to cherish, if I believed the 
universe was only dust blown through space by an aimless 
wind, and that the end was sleep. I find more comfort for a 
man, a nobler hope for a man, in these things than in the old 
comfort and hope as they were preached to us in the past. 
Nay, as they are preached to us to-day; for the very last 
number of the North Afnerican Review has a defence of this 
scheme of things by one of the leading theologians of 
America. 

What is the reason why we cannot hold this comfort and 
this hope ? How is it that they are slipping through our 
fingers ? It is worth your while to note the cause. If we 
were losing comfort and hope because the' world was grow- 
ing more ignorant and less moral, we might think that there 
was som.ething wrong at the heart of what we dare to call 



32 



The Religious Life. 



modern progress. But, as a matter of fact, is it ? We are 
losing this old comfort and this old hope, because the world 
is growing wiser and better. The wiser and the better men 
cannot keep them on these terms. 

Now consider for a moment. Can you believe that a 
truer knowledge of the universe is to issue in something 
poorer, less valuable, than the race possessed in its past of 
ignorance and in the days of its moral feebleness ? I cannot. 
If a truer knowledge of the universe means something 
poorer than we have had in the olden time, it can only be 
because the universe at heart a delusion and a sham, a 
very apple of Sodom, looking fa ^ and attractive and beauti- 
ful on the outside, but turning to ashes when you have bitten 
through the rind. Do you really believe that the universe 
will not bear examination ; that, if you get below the sur- 
face, you will find it a sham, — that it is worse than you 
thought it was ? I cannot. In every other department of 
life save this one, increased knowledge has meant a better 
condition of things for man, better physical surroundings, 
better health, increased longevity for the race, better shelter, 
better homes, better social conditions, better government, a 
higher ideal of justice, more of tenderness, more of every- 
thing that makes life sweet and pleasant. These are the 
results of a wider knowledge of the world in other depart- 
ments of life. Does it seem credible, then, that this same 
universe, a knowledge of which gives us better things in 
other directions, is going to give us, in the outcome of its 
religious department, nothing better? I cannot believe it. 
I do not believe that the universe is self-contradictory, that 
it is at odds with itself in this fashion. To doubt that knowl- 
edge of the world and increased intellectual power mean 
something better for man, — that is the only infidelity of 
which we need to be afraid. Trust in the integrity of this 



Comfort and Hope. 



33 



universe, faith in the integrity of the human mind, — these 
are essential to sanity, the essential ground for any true and 
noble life. If the universe will not bear examination, if we 
may not keep this faith in ourselves as competent to study 
and understand it, then it is all one wild chaos, one universal 
mad-house. But, if we may keep it, and if we may reason 
as we do in other departments, we have scientific ground for 
believing that there shall be more of hope and comfort than 
there have been in the past. 

Let us, then, consider two or three points in connection 
with this new knowledge he world and of man : — 

I. Everywhere else, in e 3ry other department of human 
life and thought, if we find a hunger, a real want, we feel 
perfectly certain that that indicates that there is somewhere 
an adequate source of supply. We never think of doubting 
this in any other department of life. We say, and we say 
rightly, that the eye is proof of the existence of light. If the 
human eye could be carried into a world where a ray of light 
from the sun had never shone, and there were a race of in- 
telligent beings there who had never seen light, if they were 
capable of solving the problem, they would know that there 
must have been light somewhere to have created and 
answered to the eye. So with hearing. It is proof positive 
of those movements in the external world which become 
transmuted by some wondrous process, we know not what, 
into consciousness of sound. The mariner's compass points 
to the north. We have not explained it yet ; but we know 
that there is some adequate reason in this wonderful world 
for this truth of the needle to the pole. We know it means 
something outside the needle, and that is a part of the nature 
and constitution of things. 

What shall we say, then, of these great primal, eternal, 
and universal hungers of human thought and the human 



34 



The Religious Life. 



heart ? Is there no source of supply for them ? Are they 
meaningless ? Do they not stand related to any reality in 
the nature of things ? Let us turn to our second point, and 
see what bearing it has in answer to this question. 

2. I am going to ask you, for a moment, to go down with 
me to the very lowest theory of this universe that it is 
possible to hold. You will understand that the theory I am 
to outline I do not believe in at all. I only take it as a 
basis for an argument. 

Suppose, then, that the theory of materialism is true, — that 
the dust which is blown by the winds in our streets is the 
eternal stuff out of which everything has come ; that there is 
no God ; that there is only dirt ; and that that is the original 
material of the universe. This that we see in the brick, and 
that flies in our faces when the wind blows, — this is all. 
But this humanity of ours is a reality. What is it, with all 
its constituent elements of consciousness, of hope, fear, love, 
tenderness, mercy, with its gleams of ideal visions that flit 
and pass, with its rays of that " light that never was on sea 
or land," with its " thoughts that v/ander through eternity,'^ 
• — this human race of ours, that has produced Socrates and 
Jesus and Shakspere } This race is a fact. Now, on any 
theory of the universe, no matter whether high or low, this 
human race stands in the relation to the universe of a news- 
paper to the form of type, or of a coin or medal to the die. 
Whatever there is on the newspaper or on the medal or 
coin indicates a reality in the type or the die. Something 
or somebody has made it what it is. On any theory of 
this universe, this human race of ours is the product of the 
universe ; and here, in this marvellous dirt, if this theory be 
true, or on any other theor}^, there must have been the 
potency of Hamlet and the Sermon on the Mount. These 
have come out of it. Is it not one of the fundamental 



Comfort and Hope, 



35 



principles of sane thinking for us to assume that a stream 
cannot rise higher than its source ? Must we not assume 
as a further principle of all rational thought that nothing 
can be evolved which was not first //evolved ? And, since 
this human race does not appear to have got through 
its progress, but is reaching on to something better and 
higher still, do we not know with absolute certainty that 
there is something in this universe, outside of us, at least as 
high as the highest thought, at least as true as the grandest 
truth, at least as tender as the finest tenderness, and as 
noble as the grandest nobility, as sweet as the sweetest 
hope ? Where else have they come from ? We are the 
product of this universe on any theory we choose to hold. 
This universe must be adequate, then, to as much as shows 
itself in humanity. And, since the progress is not complete, 
we know that the universe must be something more than is 
yet developed in human nature or human life. 

3. Let us consider one more point. As the result of all 
the deepest study of man and the world, I feel that I am 
justified in saying to you that there is no longer any room 
for rational discussion on the question as to whether the 
theory of materialism is or is not true : it is condemned 
finally, and put out of court as irrational and absurd. By 
the finest test that can be applied to it, it has utterly failed 
to account for two things, — for consciousness and for thought. 
Suppose there was a theory of the solar system that gave 
some rational account of certain phases of the moon, some 
little information about the asteroids or the meteoric stones 
that fall to the earth, but that should be entirely incompe- 
tent to explain the movements of the earth and the sun. 
Should we consider it a reliable theory 'i Now, then, the 
theory of materialism, whatever it may account for with 
reference to some physical matters, utterly fails when we 



36 



The Religious Life. 



seek to account for consciousness and thought, those two 
things which are the most important in all the world. It 
breaks down utterly in the presence of these problems that 
most need to be solved. So w^e are sure that there is in this 
universe something more and higher than dust. 

4. As the result of human study and thought and progress 
up to this hour, what are we prepared to say concerning the 
relative amount of comfort and hope that humanity has 
enjoyed.^ Is it not true that I am almost justified in sum- 
ming up all progress of civilization by saying that, as the 
result of it, there is more comfort and less discomfort in the 
world, physically, mentally, and morally; that there is less 
of fear and despair, more of trust and of hope, less of hatred 
and cruelty, more of tenderness and love ? The progress of 
the world up to this hour, then, means through all its phases 
an increase of comfort and hope and joy and peace, and 
of those things that are sweetest and finest and highest in 
human nature and human life. That is what we mean by 
saying that the world is civilized. 

Is it rational, then, for us to suppose that this process 
has been going on up to this hour, and now that it is sud- 
denly to be reversed There is certainly no ground for so 
strange, so unnatural a belief. Here, then, in the facts of 
human progress up to the present time, we have an impreg- 
nable basis for faith, — faith in the universe, faith in man, 
faith in the surety of those things that are most essential to 
our comfort and our peace. Faith is no faith, if it have not 
a basis of fact, if it have not a background of human experi- 
ence ; but this faith of which I speak has this basis of fact, 
has this background of human experience, and, in the light 
of it, we see the trend of human progress from the beginning 
till to-day. It looks out toward the future, and sees which 
way humanity is moving. There is then ground for the 



Comfort and Hope. 



37 



truest trust ; there is reason for our singing our faith in such 
words as these : — 

He kept his faith. If Doubt e'er said, 

" I wonder if " — he cried : 
" There is no if ! The eternal One 

Is changeless, true, and tried." 

When passing mists and shadows hide 

The mountain from our view, 
The mountain changes not, and still 

The sky beyond is blue. 

When sweeps the rising tide above 

The headlands of the shore, 
The rocks their rooted place maintain 

Through all the threatening roar. 

When feelings, fancies, like the mists. 

Our guiding stars blot out ; 
When tides of vague and dark unrest 

Make all one sea of doubt, — 

Then know, O dear and troubled heart, 

The mists and tides will pass ; 
While stars and rocks shall show again 

Clear in the sea of glass. 

The One ye trust shall know no change ; 

Then let your fancies fly 
Like clouds that come and go again 

Across the changeless sky. 

The outcome, then, of this discussion I may put in a few 
words. Take the lowest theory of the universe that you 
can hold, and even if it come to pass that the old comfort 
and the old hope must be given up, even then modern 



38 



The Religious Life. 



thought is an unspeakable gain ; while on the highest theory 
of the universe and of man, the one that I believe that we 
have rational and scientific grounds for holding, there is 
a grand basis on which to rest new evidence that there will 
be a larger and sweeter and nobler comfort than the past 
has ever known, and room also for an endless and unspeak- 
able hope. 



RELIGIOUS AND ETHICAL SANCTIONS. 



My purpose is to discuss the relation between moral 
sanctions, the sanctions of conduct and character, and 
religious and theological beliefs ; as to whether there is any 
necessary relation between the two, what that relation is, 
and whether there is any danger to morals springing out of 
theological and religious changes and transitions. 

The old Hindu priests used to teach the people, what per- 
haps they believed themselves, that the earth was supported 
on immense pillars. It is of no consequence, for our pur- 
pose, what they thought these pillars rested on or how 
far down the different supports may have reached into the 
abyss. It is enough for us that they believed that this 
earth rested on these pillars, the earth being figured in their 
minds as an immense flat plain. It was perfectly natural that 
they should hold such ideas at that time, because they had 
not learned to see the world in any truer light. But — and 
this is the point I have in mind — they were accustomed not 
only to teach that the earth was thus supported, but that the 
stability of these supports depended upon the fulfilment of 
their religious duties on the part of the people. They said. 
Pay your religious dues, bring your tithes, your offerings, 
present the regular sacrifices, maintain all the ritual of 
your religion, and these pillars will remain stable and 
firm. But, if you fail in any of these particulars, if you 



40 



TJie Religious Life. 



relax your religious ideas, if you are false to us, — the repre- 
sentatives of the gods, — then these pillars, the supports of 
the earth, will give way, and the world will be precipitated 
into irretrievable ruin. They taught that the very stability, 
not of society alone, but of the earth, depended upon the 
fulfilment of supposed religious obligations. 

A similar idea to this — similar, at least, in some respects 
and to some extent — has been held by the strict adherents of 
every religion in all time. We have had a striking example 
of it, lately, in an article by a Presbyterian, Prof. W. G. T, 
Shedd, in the last North American Review, who has come to 
the defence of the doctrine of everlasting punishment. In 
the course of that defence, he has announced his belief 
that the stability of society, moral principles, moral char- 
acter, moral conduct, depends entirely upon the permanence 
of the people's belief in religious ideas as he understands 
them. He says that when people lose their faith in certain 
doctrines, then society is in danger of being precipitated 
into chaos : moral stability depends upon a certain set 
of theological beliefs. This, you see, is of the same kind as 
that conviction of the Hindu priests ; for, if society is really 
to be plunged into chaos, it does not much matter what 
becomes of the world, on which society simply finds a field 
for the display of its activities. The world, then, according 
to Prof. Shedd, is quite as dependent on certain theological 
and religious beliefs as it was in the opinion of the old 
Hindu priests. 

Three or four years ago, I think it was. Prof. Goldwin 
Smith, himself a Liberal in belief and thoroughly in sym- 
pathy with the progress of modern ideas, proclaimed his 
fear that, in the breaking down of the old sanctions of 
belief, we were in danger of what he called a " moral inter- 
regnum," — of a period, at least, when there should be recog- 



Sanctiojis. 



41 



nized no supreme moral authority, when there should be no 
king in the moral world, when moral law should be dis- 
regarded. I trust that I shall make clear, in the course of 
this discussion, the extent and nature of this danger, if such 
there be. 

I want to note, at the outset, one other thing. It has 
been reiterated so much and so long by the leaders of 
religious thought, the recognized teachers of the world, that 
it seems to have become a part of the instinctive thought 
and common belief of the great masses of men. So much 
is this so, that, if a person begins to doi^bt the reality of his 
old beliefs, begins to question the correctness of his former 
views, to wonder whether, after all, the Bible is infallible, 
whether everything taught by the old churches is true, 
he begins at the same time to fear, to wonder whether it is 
true that morality, character, and conduct do really depend 
on these old beliefs ; whether it is safe to give up the old 
ideas, even if compelled to reject their truth. And I take 
it that something akin to this lies at the basis of the conduct 
of so many parents who have given up entirely their belief 
in the old theological ideas, who still not only permit their 
children to go to Sunday-school where they will learn them, 
but even urge them to, thinking that perhaps, after all, it is 
safer; or that there may be a certain degree of safety in 
a man or a woman learning the truth about God's universe, 
but that it may somehow be safer for the child to learn what 
is not true. I met, two or three weeks ago, an intelligent 
lady in just this state of mind. All her friends were in the 
old churches. She herself was beginning to doubt the 
reality of many of the old doctrines ; and yet she hesitated, 
and hardly dared to take a step ahead, lest, by so doing, she 
should really be endangering in her own case, and by the 
force of example in the case of others, the stability of 



42 



The RcligioiLS Life. 



certain moral principles, never having outgrown the idea 
that there is some necessary connection between a theo- 
logical belief and a moral principle or sanction. It seemed 
to me, therefore, before we get on far enough to deal with 
that portion of our subject pertaining especially to the 
religious life of the individual as such, that it would be 
worth while for me to discuss some of these general ques- 
tions, and so lay a broad foundation of thought, on which we 
may stand while we pursue our further and more special 
line of study. 

My purpose, then,- is to discuss the relation between relig- 
ious beliefs and ethical sanctions ; to find out how they are 
related to each other; how far one is dependent on the 
other, if it be so at all, and what the real relation ought to 
be. In following this line of thought, it will be necessary for 
me to go back and study for a little the origin of religion 
and the origin of ethics, that you may see the root out of 
which they spring, that you may see the natural line of their 
development, and so find out how far they are related, and 
to what degree they are independent and may be left to 
stand alone ; and to find out the point at which they come 
to a place of meeting and reconciliation. 

First, then, let us look, with this purpose in mind, at the 
origin of religious ideas and practices. 

What does it mean that this race of ours has always been 
religious ? How has it come to engage in these religious 
services, and what has it supposed it was all the while doing 
while engaging in them ? Religion always takes its rise in 
the belief in a power, or powers, separate and- distinct from 
humanity, ordinarily invisible, indefinitely great and mighty, 
— powers supposed to be able to control the destiny and 
welfare of men. At first, however, these powers are looked 
upon simpiy as invisible or heavenly despots, without any 



Sanctions. 



43 



regard to their moral character, without any regard to the 
relation in which they stand to the ordinary course of human 
conduct. 

Let us take an illustration, and see how true this is. Here 
is a North American Indian. He is starting out in company 
with the fellows of his tribe on a hunting expedition, or on 
the war-path against some hostile tribe. He does not feel 
that he is powerful enough to carry out this purpose alone, 
or, at any rate, he wishes to get all the assistance that he 
possibly can so as to insure his success. He believes that 
there are certain invisible spiritual beings recognized as 
gods and patrons of his tribe ; that they are able to do 
almost anything that they will, if he can only bring to bear 
upon them the necessary inducements. If he can only get 
their help, their alliance, then he will be certain to succeed 
in his hunting expedition, he will be certain to triumph over 
his enemies ; unless, as it has sometimes happened, the god 
who is helping his enemies should be mightier than his own 
god. But, at any rate, he is safer to fight against his enemy, 
if he has his god as an ally, than to go agamst them without 
that help. So what does he do ? He brings certain offer- 
ings, he enacts certain ceremonies or rites. The nature of 
the offering he will bring and of the rites and ceremonies 
will depend upon his thought concerning the character of the 
god. He will try to bring him what he supposes the god 
wants, and to do what he supposes the god wants him to do. 
Do you not see that in all this process there is no moral con- 
sideration whatever ? No more moral consideration than 
there is when a man goes to Washington to try to bring in- 
fluence to bear on his representative, and through him upon 
the higher officials, in order to get some piece of business 
carried through. He does not think of it as moral one way 
or the other, any more than transacting a piece of business 



44 



TJie Religious Life. 



at his store. It is simply unmoral : he is merely dealing with 
these celestial powers. 

Take a more imposing example. Go back to the time of 
the Trojan war. Here are the Greeks besieging year after 
year this city of Troy. Juno, the wife of Jupiter, the queen 
of heaven, is on the side of the Greeks : Venus, and the 
celestial powers that she can persuade to join her, are on 
the side of the Trojans. Both Greeks and Trojans bring 
offerings to their gods and goddesses. Did they have 
any thought whatever of there being any connection be- 
tween these rites and offerings and their own moral char- 
acters ? Not a whit. No more than they would have 
thought they were engaged in a moral action having any 
connection with virtue, honesty, truthfulness, or sincerity, 
when they were engaged in trying to get some neighboring 
king or potentate to send allies to join their army. 

Not only were the religious services of these times entirely 
divorced from morality, but the gods and goddesses were 
looked upon as merely heavenly inhabitants, not unlike 
humanity, favored only by being immortal and endowed with 
certain characteristics greater than human. Take Venus. 
She wishes to favor the Trojans. yEneas, — this is related 
in the ^neid of Virgil, — ^neas with a certain number of 
followers sets off to found a colony. Juno wishes to bring 
disaster upon them on the sea in the interest of the Greeks, 
their hereditary enemies. What does she do ? She goes to 
^olus, and offers him an immense bribe, if he will let all his 
winds loose and stir up a tempest in which the ships shall be 
wrecked and sunk, and the voyage thus be brought to a dis- 
astrous end. He accepts the bribe, and does his best to 
wreck the voyagers, and would have succeeded, only Nep- 
tune, not quite liking this unwarranted invasion of his realm, 
comes to the rescue, and produces a calm on the sea. Is 



Sanctions. 



45 



there anything moral entering into the conception of a relig- 
ion like this ? But you must not think that these were 
exceptions. These were the universal ideas of the ancient 
world. 

Take it in regard to the Jews at a similar time. In the 
very last book of the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi 
says to the people : If you want to prosper, if you want 
to get rich, if you want your children to be well, — what? 
Why, bring all your tithes, all your offerings, to the temple, 
maintain the recognized ritual and worship of Jehovah, and 
all those good things shall be yours. If you do not, Jehovah 
will be angry and punishment will fall upon you. 

Religion, then, in the old world at its best, was simply 
unmoral : it was a transaction between man and his deity, 
an attempt to get his deity to do something for him, or an 
attempt to ward off the supposed anger of his deity. And 
there was reason enough in the popular belief. If a pesti- 
lence came, the priests always interpreted it as the anger of 
God, and not as having anything to do with sanitary matters. 
It was the anger of the deity because the service of the 
temple had not been properly supported. So they were 
trained to believe in these ideas as to the religious life. 

Not only this : the ancient religions were not only unmoral, 
but, many and many a time, they were positively immoral. 
The religious worship of Venus, the worship of many of the 
Babylonian goddesses and gods, the. religious worship of 
Bacchus, the god of wine and drunkenness, — why, the very 
rites and services, the religious duties that men and women 
were called upon to perform in the service of these deities, 
from the stand-point of modern morals, were vices and 
crimes. There has never been a vice nor a crime, not one, 
that at some time and on some occasion, in the service of 
some religion, has not been a religious duty. Why did the 



46 



The Religious Life. 



Pocasset murder shock the moral sense of New England as 
it did? For no other reason than that it was the moral 
sense of New England instead of the moral sense of two 
thousand years ago. The moral ideal of the world has 
changed and grown as the ages have passed by, and that is 
why people are shocked at the murder of a child at Pocasset 
at the supposed command of God, who are not shocked at 
all at reading the same thing about Abraham in the Old 
Testament. One was regarded with horror, the other as a 
sublime religious sacrifice. This simply measures the differ- 
ence between the moral sense of the time of Abraham and 
the moral sense of New England to-day, — that one was 
looked upon as heroism and beauty and glory and religion, 
and the other as murder or insanity. The acts were pre- 
cisely the same. 

Religion, however, as humanity develops, comes to be 
moral. The Eternal is looked upon as desiring and de- 
manding righteousness on the part of the people. The 
Jews, at their best, had a glimpse of this in the Old Testa- 
ment, so that their prophets cried out, uttering, as they sup- 
posed, the ideas of Jehovah : I am weary of the blood of 
bulls and goats: bring me no more offerings. Bring me 
only righteousness, truth, justice, and mercy; for these are 
the things that now and hereafter I demand. 

How is it that religion comes to be moral I shall have 
occasion to answer that question in a moment. 

Let us turn now from these ideas in regard to the origin 
and nature of religion, and let us glance at the origin and 
nature of morality. What do people mean by morality, and 
how is it that they have come to be moral Did morality 
spring out of religion ? You can judge for 3^ourselves from 
the character of the ancient religions that I have described 
to you. You can judge, in the light of the ideas and charac- 



Sanctio7is. 



47 



ters of their advocates themselves, as to whether goodness 
and mercy and tenderness, manhood and truth, these moral 
principles, would be likely to spring out of religions such as 
I have outlined. Men became moral by the most natural 
process in the world, — as the result of experience in living 
together. They have found out that certain courses of con- 
duct are good for them, and that certain other courses of 
conduct are not good for them, — that is all there is to it. 

How did people come to condemn murder as an evil ? 
On account of their religious ideas ? No. How is it to-day? 
How would it be if the Bible were suddenly blotted out of 
existence, and the command supposed to have been uttered 
on Sinai were no more remembered Murder came to be 
recognized as a crime because people wanted to live, because 
they loved life and were not willing to be killed ; because, 
though they might be angry with some one man and wish 
him out of the way, public sentiment was against taking life 
for such cause. If it were allowed in one case, it would 
endanger, necessarily, the safety and welfare of every other 
individual in the community and nation. When did people 
learn that lying was wrong ? Just as soon as they learned 
that, in order to carry on human intercourse at all, they must 
be able to trust each other, they must be able to rely on 
what was told them as true. If lying were universal, society 
would cease to exist. There could be no possibility of 
human intercourse or human relationship, no possibility of 
carrying on trade or commerce. Modern society rests on 
mutual confidence as its foundation and corner-stone ; and 
the man who tells a lie or is false in any particular does 
what he can to crumble the very corner-stone of human 
society. This is recognized and incorporated and incarnated 
in the public sentiment against lying. Although an individ- 
ual may like to lie to carry out some purpose of his own, he 



48 



The Religious Life, 



himself in other cases hates and detests lying as injurious, 
and because he knows that the man who lies strikes at the 
very foundation of all that is valuable in the world. So in 
regard to the feelings with respect to every other vice and 
crime. They are simply the result of human experience. 
Men found that they must observe these laws of conduct, if 
they were to live together. They were necessary to life, 
prosperity, and happiness. You may take up any virtue 
that is recognized as a virtue and analyze it, and you will 
find that it is a kind of feeling, or course of conduct, that 
experience has proved to be necessary to human welfare and 
happiness. Or, if you analyze any course of conduct that 
is recognized as evil, you will find that it is something that 
threatens the welfare of mankind, the happiness and pros- 
perity of the race. 

Morality began, then, in the experience of individuals 
living within the limits of their own family or tribe. And 
the laws of morality deepened and broadened and grew, as 
the world became more and more acquainted with itself, as 
human sympathies developed and human relationships ex- 
tended. And I believe it to be a simple statement of the 
truth to say that religion ov/es a hundredfold more to 
morality than morality does to religion. How is it that men 
have come to recognize the principles of human brother- 
hood; to talk about the interests of mankind as a unit, as 
one ; to talk about a federation of nations ? 

Let us see. Here is a little tribe, living within the limits 
of its own boundary lines and caring only for its own 
welfare. The members naturally condemn theft among 
themselves, but never think of condemning stealing from 
or murdering the members of another tribe. They have 
not learned to recognize that their own welfare is bound up 
with the welfare of other tribes. Take the case of the Six 



Sanctions. 



49 



Nations. Here are six tribes banded togetiier. The limits 
of their interests would be coincident with the limits of the 
federation. The members of the federation might think 
it all right to steal from or murder the members of other 
tribes than those of the Six Nations ; but, among them- 
selves, this course of conduct would be condemned, for their 
interests were identical. When steam-ships were invented, 
or, even before that, when sailing-ships were invented, when 
nations began to come into relation with each other, when 
sympathy broadened, and people began to recognize others 
and to trade with them, then they began to get a glimpse of 
that higher truth, that there was something larger than the 
nation, that humanity was something nobler than patriotism ; 
and, just as fast as the nations have come into this relation 
of mutual dependence upon each other, just so fast has this 
sympathy and sense of brotherhood broadened and deepened 
and grown. The sense of brotherhood that enables people 
to say " Our Father," to repeat the opening words of the 
Lord's Prayer with a meaning in them, owes more to com- 
merce, to exploration, than to all the religions that ever 
were. Just as people get acquainted with each other and 
learn that they are dependent on each other, just so fast 
does this sense of brotherhood, this recognition of the prin- 
ciples of morality, grow and become real. We have not 
reached the limit of it yet. We are a great deal more 
indifferent when an Englishman is imposed on than when an 
American is. We can see a Chinaman abused in Central 
Africa; but, if an American is abused in Central Africa, 
there is war. Suppose an Irishman is not naturalized, al- 
though he may have lived in this country for ten years and 
all his interests may be here. He goes to England, and is ar- 
rested for supposed complicity in some plot. He has not been 
naturalized. He is not an American citizen. We do not 



50 



TJie Religious Life. 



trouble ourselves about him. Let England take care of her 
own. But suppose he becomes naturalized and a voter the 
day before he leaves. The whole government, then, is 
concerned in his welfare. He is an American ; and we are 
anxious to secure the rights of all Americans, whatever 
becomes of the rest of the world. This is natural. I have 
no fault to find with it, only it shows our stage of growth in 
the development of moral principles. I simply point it out 
to indicate that we have not got our moral growth yet. 
When we have, we shall be as solicitous about the rights of 
an unnaturalized as about a naturalized individual. We 
shall be as solicitous to secure the rights of a Chinaman in 
Central Africa as though he were an American ; and the 
whole world will be banded together in one league to see 
that justice and right are everywhere supreme. 

This is the way morality has grown. And do you not see, 
is it not perfectly plain, that theological ideas, that what are 
called religious doctrines, had almost nothing to do with 
this development and growth of morality ? People have 
been pious all through the ages, without thinking much about 
morality. It seems to us absurd,— that story that is told of 
the Italian bandit, who would rob and murder, but would 
not eat meat on a Friday. Yet he was perfectly logical. 
Suppose he did rob, and ev^en murder a man in robbing 
him. He could go to the priest and pay for absolution, and 
still have something left over for his own use. But, if he 
ate meat on a Friday, he would be no richer than before, 
and would have nothing with which to buy absolution ; and, 
really, this was a more serious complication, with his concep- 
tion of God, than the other was. His action was perfectly 
logical, according to the religious teaching he had received. 

Take the case of Charles II. of England or of a Louis of 
France. They were pious ; and it was no sham or mockery, 



Sanctions. 5 1 

no make-believe. We are accustomed to say to-day that, if 
a Sunday-school superintendent runs off with a lot of money, 
he is a hypocrite. Not necessarily. He may be perfectly 
devout and religious, according to his conception of re- 
ligion ; but his religion may have nothing to do with his 
moral character. In the case of Charles and Louis, the 
court circulars of the time — if there were such things — 
might have announced that the king went to mass in the 
morning, in the afternoon went out hunting ; but any time 
through the day, morning, noon, or night, he may have been 
cruel, inhuman, licentious, breaking every law of human 
morality. It never occurs to him that this is inconsistent 
with going to mass in the morning. There is no connection 
in his mind between religion and morality. But it is no 
wonder. He is taught that the king can do no wrong. 
Even philosophers like Hobbes write whole treatises, show- 
ing that there is no morality apart from the will of the ruling 
power ; and, since the king is supreme, he can do what he 
pleases. Even Luther carried his ideas so far as to say, con- 
cerning the licentiousness of the German princes, that we 
understood human nature and the fitness of things so well 
that we could overlook things like that in princes. These 
were the common ideas of the world. There was no neces- 
sary connection between pleasing this despot up in the sky 
and doing right by your neighbor. 

The character of a religion would always be best deter- 
mined by the character of the god, just as the character of 
the court of England is determined by the character of the 
king. The people, knowing that the king holds in his hands 
all the emoluments and all the honors, that he wields the 
power to banish them or take their lives even, if he does not 
like them, would naturally be ready to do anything to minis- 
ter to the king and to win his favor. And, if they believe 



52 



The Religious Life. 



with their whole heart that God up in heaven cares more for 
their reading the Bible, singing hymns, or praying, or going 
to church than for their behavior, and that their eternal 
welfare depends on their pleasing him, would it be strange if 
the masses of the people cared more for these things than 
for character and conduct ? Mr. Moody denounces every- 
thing immoral and unjust, but in the same breath tells us 
that these things do not touch the question of salvation. 
This is the modern doctrine of the Church. We are not done 
with these things yet. But, if they do not touch the ques- 
tion of salvation, is it any wonder if a man cares more for 
the endless ages of eternity than he does for the uncertain 
years of time ? 

Now, we are ready, having seen the separate origin and 
the independent progress of religion and morals, to see how 
they come to coincide with each other. By what process 
can they unite ? For I believe that, when religion and 
morality both have developed into the realization of their 
ideal, they will be recognized not any longer as separate 
from each other, but as one, the two sides of one great fact. 
Religion and morality are the two-sided shield, gold on the 
one side and silver on the other, but really one. Religion 
and morality, rightly conceived, I believe to be identically one 
at heart. Religion is only the cosmic side of morals, morals 
only the human side of religion. 

But how are they going to be married and united indis- 
solubly ? In this way. When God ceases to be thought of 
as an irresponsible, arbitrary despot outside of the universe, 
imposing his laws upon the world and man ; when men cease 
to think of him as having the ability to make a thing right or 
wrong by his will ; when they cease to think of him as hav- 
ing the ability, if he choose, to supersede or override justice 
and mercy and truth and human obligations; when they 



Sanctions, 



53 



learn to think of him as he is, as the heart and soul of the 
universe ; when they learn to think of his laws as the laws of 
the universe, the laws of life, the laws of body, mind, and 
soul, the laws of the family, the laws of society, of business, 
of nations ; when they learn to think of God thus, as residing 
in the world and in man, the heart and soul of them all, and 
of his laws as the laws of prosperity, peace, and happiness, — 
then religion and morality will be seen to be one. It will be 
seen that religious motives coincide with and re-enforce moral 
motives, and there will be no conflict between them. 

Undoubtedly there is some truth in the idea of Mr. Gold- 
win Smith as to the possibility of a moral interregnum on 
the breaking down of a man's old theological or religious 
notions, or the old reasons for his conduct, whether he calls 
them religious or moral. It of course leaves him for a time 
all at sea. How would it work in any other direction ? Sup- 
pose a community of people had been trained from their 
childhood to an implicit and unquestioning belief in a certain 
medical treatise or a treatise on hygiene ; that this book 
undertook to set forth explicitly just what they should eat or 
not eat, how many times a day they should eat and how long 
they should refrain from eating ; that it should regulate the 
treatment of their bodies in all particulars ; and they be- 
lieved it to be infallible. They believe that obedience to 
its laws will bring certain tremendous rewards, and dis- 
obedience tremendous punishments. They have never 
waked up to the fact that there are any other reasons 
why they should do so and so, except the reason, written 
down in the book. 

Suppose for generations they had been trained like this, 
and that you should suddenly impeach the- truthfulness of 
that book, and get many to doubt its infallibility, to disbe- 
lieve in the threatened penalties and the arbitrary rewards 



54 



The Religions Life. 



that had been attached to them, what would be the result ? 
At first, people would have no reasons left them for treat- 
ing their bodies one way rather than another. There would 
be no reason for doing this thing or that, and they would 
make all sorts of mistakes under the impulse of appetite and 
taste. They would feel that they had perfect liberty to do 
as they pleased. How long would they be in that state of 
mind ? No longer than the time necessary for them to try 
and find out laws for themselves. If they ate something 
unhealthy for them, they would be likely to know it. If they 
pursued courses of conduct in sanitary matters that threat- 
ened "-heir life and health, do you think they would remain 
ignorant of it many months ? They would find that the old 
laws were only partial transcripts of those which are real, 
and that with these laws they must reckon, and that to these 
laws they must be obedient at the peril of their life. If they 
chose to follow their own way and die, perhaps no one would 
hinder them ; but most people would prefer to recognize the 
forces with which they have to deal and live. They would 
find, in other words, that they were not free to do as they 
pleased, but only free to do right ; which is the only free- 
dom any man ever had or ever will have. 

Now, what is the condition of things religiously and morally 
in the world ? The whole world, almost from the beginning 
down to these modern times, has been taught a similar thing. 
It has been taught that a book or a priesthood or a church 
was the only recognized authority for character, for conduct; 
that there was not a real reason why they should do this or 
refrain from that, except that the book or priest had said so. 
That is just the state of mind of the friend of mine out West 
who said there would not be many Christians, if there were 
no devil. He had been trained to look forward to the devil 
and future punishment as the reason for any kind of moral 



Sanctions. 



55 



action, — for kindness to his family, for telling the truth. But 
suppose they were taken away. Break down your church, 
burn up all the Bibles, and would the reason for a man's 
taking good care of his family be taken away ? Take away 
the doctrine of the Trinity, and would there be no reason for 
telling the truth ? Take away foreordination, would there 
be no reason left why a man should not commit adultery ? 
Are not these laws inherent in the nature of things ? Are 
they not a part of the very constitution of the universe t 
And would not men, in a little while, learn that they are a 
part of the condition of life, of welfare, of health, happi- 
ness, and prosperity ? Is it not that which we mean when 
we talk about moral laws at all ? 

It seems to me, then, that there is some danger of a moral 
interregnum ; but it is not the fault of the new and larger 
truth. It is the fault of the false teachings of the past, 
which have led men to look at unreal reasons for character 
and conduct instead of those which are a part of the nature 
of things. It is not possible that a truer knowledge of this 
nature of things shall take them away. It will only en- 
large, deepen, broaden, lift up, and make supreme the 
higher, finer, truer moral sanctions of the natural world. 
Just as long as flowers are beautiful and fragrant, just so 
long will men believe in the beauty of human character, 
of human love, of human tenderness, of mercy. Just as long 
as the stars above us hold their courses, circling in their 
spheres, governed by the relation in which they stand to 
each other, their masses and distances, just so long will 
the units of human society circle in their natural spheres, 
being regulated by the realities of the relationships in which 
they stand to each other. Just as long as it is true that the 
scales, the symbol of justice, need equal weights on each 
side to establish an equation between them, just so long it 



56 



The Religious Life. 



will be true that there must be established an equation 
of rights and duties, in order to fulfil the ideals of human 
justice. 

These moral laws, then, are a part of the nature of things ; 
and no possible changes in theological ideas, or the dissolu- 
tion of theology altogether, if it were possible, could per- 
manently touch or weaken a single moral law by a feather's 
weight. If you cease to believe in any future life, would it 
still be right to steal ? Or suppose it were possible for the 
belief in God himself to fade completely out of the human 
mind. Humanity would still exist. We would still stand 
in relations to each other, and be able to hurt or help each 
other. All the moral laws and forces would continue in 
their integrity just the same. 

Now let us sum up the results of our discussion : — 

1. Religion started in entire independence of morality. 

2. Religion has many times been not only unmoral, but 
immoral. 

3. Religion becomes moral only when the laws of God 
are recognized as identical with the laws of the universe 
and of human life. 

4. Morality started with the facts and experiences of 
human relationship, without any necessary relation to re- 
ligion. 

5. Morality has progressed through the ages largely inde- 
pendent of religion ; and it has done more for religion than 
religion has done for it. 

6. Morality becomes a part of religion just as religion be- 
comes a part of morality, when the laws of human life, the 
laws of the universe, are recognized at last as the laws of 
God. 

7. There is danger, for the time, of the loosening of moral 
principles, of people's losing the reasons for character and 



Sanctions, 



57 



conduct through the process of the breaking down of the old 
and false standards of conduct, which have been connected 
with supernatural ideas. 

8. But progress in thought, as it deepens and broadens, 
can only at last result in a higher and grander ethical 
thought and in a nobler religious ideal. 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



I DO not know that I shall be able to make you all feel 
and think as I do this morning concerning the subject about 
which I am to speak. But, whether I shall thus be able or 
not, I am myself most thoroughly convinced that there is no 
theme in all the world comparable to this in dignity and 
importance. That I may make it clear in its treatment and 
easily comprehensible, it is a part of my plan, in the first 
place, to outline as simply as I may this matter of personal 
religion as it has been held and taught in the old theology. 
I shall not do this in any spirit of antagonism or criticism or 
opposition of any kind. I wish to look at it and have you 
look at it, to define it so that you may see clearly what the 
holders of this old theology mean and what their purpose is, 
that, thus, you may be in a state of mind that shall enable 
you to lay alongside of the old theory the new one that I 
shall present to you. So you may compare the two together 
and see their relative truth, beauty, and importance. 

In the first place, then, what do those who believe in the 
old theology mean by personal religion ? What would be 
the beginning and the growth, the general outline and termi- 
nation of such a religious life, if it were logically and con- 
sistently followed out ? 

At the outset, we must note the fact that they believe 
that every child of man is conceived in sin and born in a 
state of total alienation from God. This is sometimes 



Personal Religion. 



59 



spoken of as total depravity. They tell us that, so long as 
man continues in this state, he is unable to think or speak 
or do anything that is pleasing to God. It is very easy and 
it is somewhat cheap to hold these ideas up to indiscriminate 
ridicule. They are perfectly logical and consistent on the 
basis of the old conception of the universe, of God, and 
of man. 

Let us look for a moment at total depravity, and see what 
was meant by it. The first illustration that I shall use 
is one that was given me by my much loved and much 
respected theological professor in the Seminary. He said : 
Here are two goblets of water. I may pour in poison or 
filthiness of some kind into one, until it will contain no more, 
till I have put in as much as it is capable of holding in 
solution. Into the other, I may put a single drop of poison 
or pollution of any kind ; but it will permeate, color, touch, 
and taint every single drop, so that you may rightly say in 
the case of these two, whatever degrees of difference there 
are, both are totally polluted or soiled. That is, they are 
tainted all the way through. These foreign influences 
have taken away their purity. So they would say of men : 
not that one man is just as bad as another, or that any single 
man in all the world is just as bad as he can be ; only that 
he is wrong, some way, all through, in thought and word 
and deed. That is what they mean by total depravity. 

Now take another illustration, and see how perfectly 
logical and natural this is. They looked upon God as 
primarily the governor of the universe ; and the religious 
life was figured forth to their thought under the ideal of a 
kingdom. This world they regarded as in rebellion, dis- 
loyal ; so that every single person born into it was born 
disloyal, being thus in a state of rebellion or alienation 
from God. 



Go The Religions Life. 

Now take this figure of rebellion, and let us see how 
it looks. Suppose that one of the counties or provinces of 
England were in rebellion to-day against the central power. 
So far as the government is concerned, it would make no 
difference whether any particular individual in that province 
was an honest man in his business, true to his wife and kind 
to his children, a good neighbor, a faithful friend. In spite 
of all these virtues, he is a rebel. Consequently, so long as 
he continues such, no matter how good or noble or true he 
may be in other relations, it is impossible for him, in 
thought or word or deed, to please the king. The very 
first duty, that takes precedence of all others, is to surrender 
up the arms of his rebellion and become loyal to his king. 
That is the way in which they look at the relation in which 
we stand to God ; and that is their meaning, when they say 
that morality cannot save a man, when they say that you 
may be honorable in business, true in your family relations, 
noble in every direction, and yet be alienated from God and 
his love. If that theory of the universe is true, that is all 
logical and natural enough. It might be — we can conceive 
such a case — the duty of a noble, tender-hearted king to sign 
the death-warrant of the noblest and tenderest-hearted man 
in all his realm, for the public welfare, or because he 
continued contumacious against the laws. This is what they 
meant by total depravity, by being out of right relation with 
God. 

Now let us take a step further, and see how conviction, 
repentance, and conversion come in, what part they play. 

All the while that these men are in rebellion against God, 
he, according to the old theory, is really their rightful 
sovereign and their best friend, desiring, above all things, 
if he may consistently with what they call justice and the 
welfare of the universe, to be kind and tender and helpful 



Personal Religion. 



6i 



toward men, but held bound by the laws and by the exi- 
gences of public affairs. All the while, this king in heaven is 
their truest and best friend and, of right, their ruler. Such 
being the condition of affairs, God sends abroad his spirit all 
over the earth, and influences men's hearts, their thoughts 
and feelings, and opens their eyes to the truth. According 
to some of the old theories, this spirit is only sent to a few 
people, — the elect ; according to others, it is sent to all. 
But, in any case, the upshot of it was that he produced 
a desire, effective in the hearts of only a part of mankind. 
But those that he did reach were affected in this manner, — 
and you see how natural it is — they waked up to the fact 
at last that they owed their allegiance to God, that they 
ought to love him, that they ought to serve him, that they 
ought to worship him, that he was worthy of all the devotion 
of hand and brain and heart. And, when they fairly realized 
at last what sort of a being God was, how kind, how tender, 
how loving, that he was their father, and that they had been 
for years in open opposition to him, whether conscious of it 
or not, — when, at last, they realized this, then a flood of 
emotional sorrow swept over them j and this they call repent- 
ance. They were sad, heart-broken, to find the position 
that they had been occupying ; and, as a natural result of 
this, there came what they called conversion, a change 
of heart, to be gradually followed by a change of life. So 
the outcome of it was that they came to love what they had 
hated and to hate that which they had loved. They were 
totally changed. They had become loyal subjects. 

Now you will see clearly in the light of these theories 
another distinction that ought to be borne in mind. Sup- 
pose a person who had been in rebellion against our govern- 
ment during the late war should see the position he ought 
to occupy and lay down his arms, and should accept the 



62 



The Rcligioits Life. 



pardon of the executive, he would naturally be rewarded 
and looked on with favor, though his private character may 
not have been, and may not have become, what it ought. 
He would be treated with more favor than the noblest of 
those who still continued rebels, and rightly so. 

Then, after the man or woman had become convinced of 
sin, had repented and been converted, and had become 
a loyal subject of heaven again, — then what? 

There began a life of conscious relationship toward God ; 
a life lived in the thought of him as father, friend, king ; a 
life of trust, devotion ; a life of service, obedience. They 
did not claim that a man became suddenly good all at once 
and all through. He had turned about and was going 
the other way. He was being gradually wrought over into 
the likeness of the new ideal which he had accepted as the 
object of his worship and as the rightful lord of his life. 

Now let us see what the personal life of the man who 
should accept and consistently carry out these ideas should 
be. It would become, in the first place, his daily duty to 
read the word of God ; for he believes that the Bible is not 
only a real revelation from God, but the only and the all-suffi- 
cient one, that it contains all truth necessary for human 
conduct here and salvation hereafter. Do you not see that 
it would become his prime duty to make himself acquainted 
with the will of God as he understood it, to study the Bible 
to find out what he ought to do, to learn the laws of the 
kingdom of which he has become a citizen ? 

And then, in the next place, do you not see how natural 
it would be for a man under these ideas to feel his life 
somehow lifted up into a higher range, thrilled by a purpose 
that did not exist before, — a purpose giving dignity and 
grandeur to it ; and, if he thoroughly believed it, what 
matter how other people treated the question 1 Let them 



Personal Religio7i. 



63 



scoff if they will, let them find fault if they will, let them 
sneer if they will : he is conscious of standing in a relation- 
ship with the great universal Power that gives his life dignity 
and meaning. 

Suppose, during the war, we had sent an ambassador 
south under pledge of safe conduct and safe return. He 
goes there as the representative of the United States. What 
would he care for the howling of the rebel mob 'i What 
would he care for the scorn and contempt of those who 
stood in opposition to that power that he believed had right- 
ful authority over all the land ? The fact that he stood as 
representing that power would give him dignity, self-confi- 
dence, rest, and trust, a purpose to his life that he could not 
otherwise have had. 

Then, it had another element, which is important on any 
theory of human life. It gave him trust in the midst of 
failure, confidence in the face of adversity. If he really 
believed it with his whole soul, it would not trouble him 
much, though even kingdoms rose and fell. He believed that 
his Father was God and King over all the universe, of which 
this earth was only one little province, and the cause with 
which he had allied himself was supreme and eternal. He 
would feel very much as the Duke of Wellington did. It is 
said that a missionary from some part of the world had re- 
turned to England discouraged, disheartened, feeling that 
nothing could be accomplished. He was a personal friend 
of the Duke of Wellington, a younger man. Meeting him 
after his return, the duke asked him about his experience ; 
and he told him. The duke said : Do you believe in the 
God that you claim to believe in 1 Do you believe that he 
has undertaken to convert the world sometime ? Do you 
believe that he is able to carry out his plans ? Do you be- 
lieve that he has appointed you to do any definite work? 



64 



The Religions Life. 



And, when the missionary had given an affirmative answer 
to all these questions, he said : Is it not, then, your clear 
duty to stand at your appointed post, no matter what hap- 
pens, whether the cause seems to go up or down ? That 
is the soldier's duty. This fortress or that may be captured, 
this army or that may be defeated or wasted, or it may suc- 
ceed ; but the cause, supreme above all, m.oves on in tri- 
umph. 

Then, lastly, a person believing in this theory and living 
it out consistently will face even death without any fear. 
There are very few in the modern world, so far as my ob- 
servation is able to inform me, who really do consistently 
and logically believe; and that is the reason that there is so 
little of this logical and grand living., even on any theory. 
But he that does believe this has no fear of death. Let 
death come when it will, he dies happy. So must it be, if he 
is consistent. He is in the state of mind of General Wolfe 
at the siege of Quebec. You remember how he lay mortally 
wounded in the arms of his attendants, and, as he heard the 
cry, " They flee ! they flee ! " he raised himself, and asked 
feebly, "Who flee.?" And when they told him, "The 
French," " Then," said he, " I die happy ! " The cause 
was supreme in his thought. Sure of its final victory, noth- 
ing else mattered. This I believe to be the grandest con- 
ception possible to give to the religious life as lived under 
the old theory of the universe. 

Now, our question is : Is there any chance for anything like 
that, or as noble as that, on the modern theory of the world 1 
Is there any power to trust in 1 Is there any ground for 
allegiance ? Is there any possibility of conscious alliance 
with a cause that shall lift up and dignify human life after 
this fashion, and make it seem worth while to live ? 

I believe, in the first place, that we have a God unspeakably 



Personal Religion. 



65 



grander than the old. Indeed, he is so vast, so grand, that 
thousands of people in the modern world entirely lose sight 
of him. They label one manifestation of his power by one 
name, and another manifestation of his presence by another 
name, until, bewildered by the infinity of detail, they lose 
hold entirely of the sense of that unity that is in and above 
all, and of which these are only glimpses and outshining 
rays. 

Suppose, on a visit to Rome, you should go to St. Peter's, 
and, standing without the cathedral, should go up until you 
stood within a foot of its walls : what would you see ? St. 
Peter's would be there, so near that you could not see it. It 
would be above you, overshadowing and overwhelming. All 
around you in its magnificence, and, just because it was so 
close to you, it would seem only a little meaningless stone, — 
no plan, no purpose, no magnificence, no grandeur. Not 
because there is no St. Peter's, but because you stood in 
such relation to it that you could not comprehend it or take 
in its meaning. 

I do not expect you to comprehend our God. One reason 
why I think we have lost him in this modern world is just 
because we have waked at last to the fact that he is infinite 
and that we are finite. He is so vast that we can find no name 
to cover him, no definition to outline him. And this, which 
is unspeakable gain, seems loss to us, because we are be- 
wildered and overwhelmed by the sense of immensity. Peo- 
ple say to me sometimes, " I cannot grasp the idea of God ; 
I cannot picture him ; I cannot think him." No, friends : 
you have no right to grasp him, to outline him. How can 
you, if he is infinite ? And, if he be not infinite, he is no 
God. If you could reduce him to such proportions that you 
could draw a picture of him, either on canvas or in your 
mind, that very act would be the signing of your own moral 



66 



The Religious Life. 



and spiritual death-warrant. If you could get to the end of 
God, if you could march to the limit and look over into the 
vast abyss of nothing where is no God, then you might come 
to a time when we should have gotten through, when there 
would be nothing more to hope, nothing more to live for. 

And now, lest you should think I am coining ideas of my 
own, born of prejudice and bias, I am going to read to you 
two or three sentences from Mr. Herbert Spencer, a man 
whom I regard as the master of thought in the modern world, 
a man who for breadth and comprehensiveness of mind has 
never in the history of mankind had his equal, a man who 
comes nearer to grasping all knowledge than any other man 
who walks the earth. Let us see what he says : " Amid the 
mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they 
are thought about, there will remain the one absolute cer- 
tainty that he [man] is ever in presence of an Infinite and 
Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." Again, 
" So far from regarding that which transcends phenomena 
as the all-nothingness, I regard it as the All-being." 

Once more : " I held at the outset, and continue to hold 
that this Inscrutable Existence which science in the last 
resort is compelled to recognize as unreached by its deepest 
analyses of matter, motion, thought, and feeling, stands 
toward our general conception of things in substantially 
the same relation as does the Creative Power asserted by 
theology ; and . . . this reality transcending appearance, . . . 
standing toward the universe and toward ourselves in the 
same relation as an anthropomorphic creator was supposed 
to stand, bears a like relation with it, not only to human 
thought, but to human feeling, . . . and there must ever 
survive those [sentiments] which are appropriate to a power 
that is omnipresent." 

We are, then, in the presence of a Power not ourselves, 



Personal Religio', 



67 



a Power that was here before we were born, a Power that 
will continue when we have passed away, a Power that 
would not be touched though the earth were ground to 
powder and strewn as dust through space. This Power, so 
far as we can think, is infinite, eternal, omnipresent. It is 
a Power that manifests itself as purpose. We can trace its 
path from the world's beginning on and up unto the pres- 
ent time ; and by a purely scientific faith see it reaching out 
toward some grand, far-off event. This Power is nearer to 
us than anything else that we can conceive. It is in the 
farthest star; it is in the fragrance of the flower that you 
hold in your hand. It is the Power in all moral progress. 
It is the Power in all that material advance that constitutes 
civilization. It is the Power of all life, of all feeling, of all 
hope, of all aspiration. It is that which comes to conscious- 
ness in ourselves. It is that which throbs in my wrist. It 
is that which lifts me as I aspire. We may say in all literal- 
ness with the Psalmist : " Whither shall I flee from thy pres- 
ence ? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there ; if I make 
my bed in the underworld, behold, thou art there ; if I take 
the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts 
of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right 
hand hold me." 

We are in the presence, then, of this Infinite Eternal 
Energy from which all things proceed, in which all things 
consist. 

Another step. On our knowledge of and obedience to 
this Power depends all human good. Every step that man 
has made in civilization, in invention, in control over the 
material world, has been just one new step in understanding 
and obeying this Infinite and Eternal Energy. Whatever 
power we have to-day over nature we have earned by learn- 
ing a little about what we call the laws of this Power, and 



68 



TJie Religious Life. 



obeying them. Every upward step of moral improvement, 
everything we have done in the way of political amelioration 
or toward just government, every step in the uplifting of 
religious thought and life, every step in the development of 
love and extirpation of fear, every step that means human 
progress, means just learning a little more about the ways 
of this Infinite Energy, and obeying a little better. And 
every hope for the future means simply learning still a little 
more and obeying a little better still. 

Now, then, what? Is not here basis for religion, personal 
religion ? It becomes your first duty and mine to read the 
word of God just as literally as under the old theory, only 
the word of our God is not bound in any book. It is as 
wide as the universe. It is written in the stars, written in 
the dust beneath our feet. Every word of truth and life is 
a part of its growing revelation. It becomes your first duty, 
then, and mine, to read God's book, every day to , spell out 
some new syllable or word. 

The next duty is that of obedience to his laws, the con- 
ditions of life and growth, just so fast and so far as we can 
discover them. 

Now, I want you to turn with me for a moment and see 
how here, in the presence of this God, so much grander than 
the old, in the presence of this human destiny, so much more 
hopeful than the old, there still remain the possibility, the 
duty, and the privilege of personal, religious living. Let us 
note some few of the details of it. 

How is it that we are born into this world t I said that, 
under the old theory, people were supposed to be born 
totally depraved. We do not think of ourselves as under 
any curse or wrath of God. We do not believe that he is at 
enmity with us or we with him. But we do come into this 
world ignorant, weak, the play of impulses and forces that 



Personal Religion. 



69 



we do not comprehend, and that seem to have no object, no 
outcome. And thousands of men, the great majority per- 
haps, go through life without any leading, dominant purpose 
that is noble, that is worthy of man. They care simply to 
get rich. They care, perhaps, for literary fame. They care 
for power or social standing. They drift with the current; 
they creep ; they plod. They are consecrated to no 
supreme ideal that gives unity and dignity to life, that makes 
them feel that they are a part of some purpose that is superior 
to all change or decay. 

But, in the case of the noblest men, — I am not talking 
metaphysics or saying anything incapable of being compre- 
hended, — you know how natural a life like this may be. 
They may not be distinguished, they may be leading an 
obscure life; but, at some definite time, — they can some- 
times remember when it was, — they were convicted and 
self-condemned by the vision of a higher life. They gained 
a glimpse of some grand ideal ; and they set that up as the 
finest image of God they could conceive in the inner 
sanctuary of their hearts. They bowed down before it. 
They measured their lives by it They became restless and 
dissatisfied with the old life, with its lower purpose, made 
grand by no lofty aim. 

Do you know, in the department of art, in the department 
of literature, of political ambition, it is just this distinction 
that I am trying to outline that makes all the difference 
between a grand life and a mean one ? 

What is the difference between a politician and a states- 
man ? Take Sumner and some place-hunter. What is it 
that separates the two men ? One has an ideal, a great 
thought as to the service he can render by being true to 
principle and seeking some high aim. The other simply 
cares for temporary expedients, for success to-day or to- 



70 



The ReligioiLS Life. 



morrow, to reward his friends and punish his enemies. 
One worships and follows an ideal : the other is blown 
about by every changing wind of impulse, drifting on every 
current and tide. So it is in art, in literature. So it may be 
in every department of life. 

We need this conviction of sin." We need repentance " 
and " conversion " ; not after the old idea, but we need 
better things than those old terms embodied. There is 
place for this in modern thought as much as in the old. 

Turning thus from our lower and selfish lives, it is possible 
for us consciously and purposely to ally ourselves with the 
God whose infinite life I have tried to suggest. Which way is 
it moving, — toward more knowledge, toward more justice^ 
toward more love, toward more happiness, toward a better 
civilization t It is moving toward a better, not a poorer 
future. That is the track of God through the centuries. 

We can consciously ally ourselves, then, with this supreme 
manifestation, this Eternal Energy that is moving through 
the ages. And think how a life is upheld by this thought 1 
Think how much grander it becomes ! We have a purpose 
now : business may fail, friends may sicken, the dearest even 
may die ; but the light is not all gone out of the heavens^ 
the purpose has not all faded out of life. We are a part of 
the army marching on toward a sure success. Comrades 
fall by our side, the detachment is beaten : no matter, we 
still trust and we still march on. Do only a few reach this 
ideal t It is a reality none the less. 

Here, then, is dignity, here is purpose, here is meaning, 
here is grandeur in life. And there comes to us, from this 
conscious alliance with this Infinite and Eternal Power, this 
casting our influence in with the divine trend of things 
toward the good and the true, a consciousness of power, of 
trust, of peace, of rest. And there comes — or I believe 



Personal Religion, 



n 



may come — an ability to face even the last enemy without 
either flinching or fear. 

A man allied then with God, living for God, caring for this 
more than for anything else, conscious of the fact of this 
likeness of nature between that which is highest in him and 
that which is highest and dominant everywhere, — how can 
he fail to believe at the last that the same destiny awaits him 
as awaits this Eternal Power? He is swept on and borne 
along by an infinite current, to which he feels himself akin. 
And, at the last, I believe it to be a rational hope of such 
souls as these, when they trust that they shall share in that 
far-off, infinite triumph of the true, the beautiful, the good, 
which means the dominance of this Power which is working 
in and leading on mankind. 

Let me close by summing up the points with which we 
have been dealing this morning : — 

1. There is ground for a personal religious life. 

2. There is ground for the thought side, there is ground 
for the emotional side, of religion, — not only equal to that 
which we have outgrown, but unspeakably grander. 

3. There is ground for worship, reverence, aspiration, 
trust, hope. 

4. It becomes our duty to study the laws of this Infinite 
Life and obey them, just as much as it was under the old 
theory. 

5. We have a greater and nobler God than the old. 

6. We have a grander man and a better outlook. 



INNER LIFE AND OUTER. 



I HAVE already made you familiar with one main character- 
istic of all the old religions, — the fact that almost the entire 
emphasis of their worship was laid on the outward ceremony. 
The acceptable worshipper was not necessarily a moral man; 
and no account whatever was taken of the disposition of his 
heart. The gods were beings whose good will it was impor- 
tant to gain and keep. They could confer favors ; they could 
ward off impending calamities. Health, good harvests, pros- 
perity in business, success in war, all the affairs of life, were, 
or at any time might be, at their mercy. To please them 
then, and keep them pleased, were the most important of all 
earthly concerns. 

But how please them and keep them pleased ? Not by 
character or good conduct, in the human sense of those 
terms, much less by the inner state or disposition of the 
heart. In the more elaborated and highly developed of 
these old religions, the form of the ritual Was so definitely 
fixed that any, even the least, departure from it was sup- 
posed to vitiate the whole ceremony and make it fail of its 
purpose. The gods were not thought of as loving mankind ; 
nor were their laws supposed to have anything to do with 
human goodness. Indeed, the gods were oftener repre- 
sented as jealous of human happiness, or even as being in- 
clined to cruelty. But they were capable of being influenced, 



Inner Life and Outer. 



73 



in some cases even coerced, into helping their worshippers, 
or, at least, not injuring them, if only the right means were 
employed. These right means had somehow been discov- 
ered, and were in the keeping of the priests. The sacrifice 
must be of just the specified kind, killed with just such a 
kind of knife, burnt on just such an altar, with just such 
wood for the fire. The bodily attitudes, genuflections, and 
gestures were all fixed. In the prayers, just such words 
must be used ; while even the rhythm, the accent, the tones 
of voice were supposed to be of prime importance. When 
all the specified conditions were complied with, it was thought 
that somehow the gods were compelled to be favorable. 

The tendency to these purely external and wholly super- 
stitious whims is long-lived and hard to be outgrown. Even 
to-day, in certain High Church quarters, God is supposed to 
be particularly pleased when the priest in his prayer is facing 
toward the east. The point of the compass is more impor- 
tant than goodness of heart. A hundred other illustrations 
of similar import you can furnish for yourselves. 

But what I wish you to bear in mind is the fact of this 
externality of all the old religions. It was not even an ex- 
ternality of conduct, but only of ceremonial. Character was 
neither a necessary cause nor a necessary result of worship. 
So long as the prescribed forms were observed in accord 
with the traditional methods, nothing more was expected. 

Let us pass now to consider the position that Jesus held 
and taught. And right here, in justice to Jesus as well as 
for the clearness of your own thought, keep one thing ever 
in mind. Jesus is not to be held responsible for the fact that 
the Church has so often put ceremony above character, or 
made it the condition of supposed divine favor and human 
welfare. He himself was never guilty of this confusion. 
Indeed, a large part of the offence for which he was held to 



74 



TJie Religious Life. 



be worthy of death was just this supposed impiety of teach- 
ing that the popular view of religion was wrong. They had 
their temple, their sacrifices, their ritual, which they regarded 
as of divine appointment. But he disregarded the temple, 
slighted the sacrifices, and neglected the ritual. For these 
things, they not only supposed God's anger would rest upon 
him ; but even to permit it they thought might be regarded 
as complicity on their own part in a grievous wickedness. 
For he taught that an inner, spiritual worship was better than 
the temple, and that such a worship might be offered any- 
where else as well as in Jerusalem. He even went so far as 
to say that, though the offering had been brought and laid 
upon the altar, the whole service might be made of no avail 
by the worshipper's being out of right relation to his fellow- 
men. 

In contrast, then, with most of the old religions, Jesus 
laid the chief emphasis on the disposition of the heart. 
This is the significance of that scene where he discusses with 
his disciples the question — made so much of at the time — 
of washing the hands before eating. It is not what you eat 
or how you eat, he says, that is of importance, — not what 
goes into the stomach, but what comes out of the heart. 
The heart he declares to be the fountain of character. 
Here is found the reason why he places the Magdalen, who 
had learned to love the ideal of a better life, above the 
Pharisee, who, while ceremonially perfect, was hard, selfishly 
proud, and uncharitable. The disposition being right, all 
the rest would naturally follow. But let that be wrong, and 
ultimately the outer life is sure to be vitiated by it. If one 
is facing toward Boston, though a thousand miles away, he is 
more likely to reach it some time than one who, ever so close 
to its borders, keeps on walking in a direction that in the 
slightest degree diverges from its boundary line. Do you 



hmer Life and Outer. 



75 



not look more complacently upon a faulty child that loves 
you than you do upon the most ceremoniously dutiful one 
whose heart is selfish and cold ? 

Whatever truth there is in the popular theory of conver- 
sion is to be looked for just here. This doctrine is only a 
distortion of the teaching of Jesus that the state of the heart 
is the all-important thing. Here, also, is to be found so 
much of reality as there is in the dogma of "justification by 
faith," as held by Paul and Luther. They did not mean 
justification by belief, though it has been often so misinter- 
preted. They only laid their emphasis on the attitude of the 
soul. They said this was more important than outward con- 
duct, because ultimately, and in the long run, it would prove 
the fountain and cause of conduct. 

It is a common saying in the modern world that, " if a 
man does what is about right, that is all there is to it. It is 
all that is required. He need not trouble himself about 
anything else." Yes, perhaps so, and in one sense. But I 
think there is a question deeper than that. " If he does 
what is about right ! " But who is he that is likely to do 
" what is about right " ? Of one person, you say, " I would 
trust that man anywhere." Of another, you say, " You can 
trust him as long as you keep your eye on him," or " as long 
as you make it for his interest to be honest." What is the 
difference between two such men ? The conduct of the two, 
under certain circumstances, may be precisely the same. 
Yet you feel that one of them is honest, the other is not. 
Where is the difference ? Is it not in the heart ? 

We are now ready to consider the relation between the 
inner life and the outer. It presents itself for our notice 
under several different aspects. 

I remember that, some years ago, Mr. Beecher, speaking 
of certain places where Christians thought they ought not to 



76 



The ReligioiLS Life. 



go, told his congregation that they might as well go as to 
stay at home, while all the time wishing they were there. 
This is the same as to say that the wish is as bad as the act, 
that whatever is in the heart might as well come out in the 
life. And Jesus, perhaps in his anxiety to emphasize a 
point so generally overlooked, appears to go to the same 
extreme ; for he seems to teach that anger, which might 
lead to murder, is as bad as murder, and that inward lust is 
as bad as outward guilt. Is it, then, as bad to think evil as 
to do it ? Suppose that only opportunity be lacking Let 
a man hate another one, and let his hate take the form of 
wishing to burn his house down over his head : might 
he as well do it as wish it t In a certain sense, you may say 
that he is just as bad as though he did it. But even this 
admission must be modified ; for a deed like that, accom- 
plished and put beyond recall, would certainly react with 
more disastrous force on his own character than would 
merely the inner hate, that might die out and pass away. 
And, then, the stigma of an outward and accomplished deed 
of wrong abides with a man. It depresses and discourages 
him, and so stands in the way of moral recovery. The 
social disgrace and the distrust of his fellow-men also make 
more difficult his return. He is apt to think that there is no 
use in trying, since people will put no faith in his pro- 
fessions. 

And, then, however it may be for the man himself, it is 
certainly not so bad for society to have a man harbor an 
evil purpose as it would be to have him do an evil deed. 
I feel quite sure that I should rather have a man wish a 
hundred times to burn down my house than that he should 
do it once. He may hate me ever so much ; but, so long as 
he does not murder me, it is most assuredly quite a different 
thing so far as I am concerned. It may be as bad for him, 
but it is a good deal better for me. 



Inner Life and Outer. 



77 



Organized society, then, and government as such are 
chiefly concerned — and rightly so — with the outer lives of 
men and women. In a certain and a very important sense, 
it is none of their business what I think or how I feel, so 
long as my outer conduct is not injurious to my fellow-men. 
This does not mean that my thought and feeling are not of 
immense importance, nor that they are not the fountains 
out of which all my good or bad actions flow. But they 
have no jurisdiction over my motives. They can take ac- 
count only of the Conduct that springs from them. And 
this limitation of their authority is found in the fact that 
they have no means for getting at or deciding upon the 
quality of my inner life. Suppose a man has committed a 
crime. What judge, what jury, is wise enough to take the 
measure of his soul and estimate the degree of his personal 
guilt Society has a right to protect itself from evil-doers, 
but is not able to pass upon the motives that lead to the 
evil deeds. 

And so, in the sphere of religion, it is of immense impor- 
tance what a man thinks and how he feels. These are even 
the matters of prime importance ; for, ultimately, thought 
and feeling determine all conduct. But, in all ages, govern- 
ment has made its most disastrous and cruel mistakes in 
attempting to deal with the thought and feeling of individ- 
uals. For, in the first place, no government is wise enough 
to decide as to the right or tlie wrong of religious beliefs and 
emotions. And, in the second place, it is none of the gov- 
ernment's concern as to whether a man's soul is saved or 
not in some other world. Its authority is limited to the 
matter of his conduct as a citizen in this world. 

And herein is seen the weakness of society in its great 
movements of reform. It cannot get at the hearts of indi- 
viduals and make them right. The most it can do is to im- 



78 



TJie Religious Life. 



prove the external conditions a little, and make it somewhat 
easier for people to do right, provided they are so inclined. 
In the light of this consideration, we ought to be able to see 
the folly of trying to legislate people into goodness, or to 
make them moral by wholesale. Fence them in by laws, 
and still their hearts are just where they were before. Gov- 
ernment, then, can only deal with the externals, the actions 
of men. 

But, if we only could, how much more might be accom- 
plished ! The philosophers tell us that all motion is rhythmic. 
The tidal ebb and flow, the backward and forward swing of 
the pendulum, — these are symbolic of all movement. It is 
thus that human progress goes on. One age is introspec- 
tive, mystic, transcendental. The best people flee from the 
world, and try to live in the inner realm of contemplation, 
thought, and feeling. The tendency of the present age is all 
the other way. The outer condition with us is everything. 
The immensity of modern physical discovery ; the wondrous 
inventions by means of which we are making our conquests 
over natural conditions and forces ; the enormous increase of 
wealth; the extent and variety of our products and manu- 
factures, — all these stir the ambition and stimulate the imagi- 
nation of men. We are looking for an earthly Utopia. 
And, since it does not come fast enough to suit the hurry of 
the age, we find restlessness and growing dissatisfaction 
everywhere. Thefts on the part of clerks who cannot get 
money fast enough ; defalcations by trustees and treasurers ; 
unreasoning strikes, when factories cannot run except at a 
loss ; wild, communistic theories as to the division of prop- 
erty ; the general thirst for outward display ; the grasping 
and clutching after the external conditions of happiness. — 
these all indicate an excessive emphasis placed by the pres- 
ent age on the outer life. If a rich man appears to care only 



Inner Life a7id Outer. 



79 



for money, he must not wonder that his workmen are infected 
by the same spirit. When the house counts for more than 
the man, it is not very strange that everybody wants the 
house. And if, when it is obtained, the means of getting it 
are forgotten in the fact of possession, why be so scrupulous 
about the means ? So will people reason. 

Now, this desire for the external is natural ; and, to a cer- 
tain extent, it is a sign of healthy life. It is not well to be 
content with poor outward conditions, when better ones are 
possible. For as the inner condition reacts on the outer life, 
so does the outer condition react in its turn on the inner 
life. Good houses, pleasant surroundings, healthy sanitary 
arrangements, — these help produce, not only happiness, but 
morals. But when carried too far, and used merely for lux- 
ury and display, they demoralize instead of lifting up. 

Once in a while, something happens to wake us up to the 
fact that, of the two, the inner life is the more important. 
We see a man like Thoreau in his cabin by Walden Pond, 
and discover that he is not only leading a manlier, but a 
happier life than many a millionnaire. We are startled in our 
race for money by hearing Agassiz say, in the midst of his 
fishes, that he is employed about matters so much more im- 
portant that he "cannot stop to make money." Or down 
from the far-off ages comes the cynic word of Diogenes, 
telling Alexander the Great that he knows of nothing the 
world-conqueror can do for him except to stand out of his 
sunlight. Or we see Palissy the potter, or Elias Howe, 
spending his whole life to bless the world with a new inven- 
tion. Or the haloed head of some teacher, martyr, leader 
of thought, shines down on us out of their sky of noble 
achievement. Or Jesus, having " not where to lay his head," 
talks to us of having " meat to eat that " we " know not of " and 
of a " treasure " different from that on which we draw checks 



8o 



TJie Religious Life. 



at a bank. Some of us learn at last that there is really a 
world of great satisfaction in which the poets, the philoso- 
phers, the artists, the men of thought, live ; and that thought- 
ful sympathy is the key by which any one, though not himself 
a creator, may enter in. We find that those who are de- 
voted to making the world happier and better think they 
have found something more satisfying than getting things for 
themselves. We find a man niggard and narrow and mean, 
burdened by wealth that he does not know how to use. And 
we find broad-minded and happy lives in the midst of only 
ordinary comforts. Then, perhaps, we get an occasional 
glimpse of what the poet meant when he sung, — 

" My mind to me a kingdom is." 

And then, perhaps, we are ready to say : " Maybe, after all, 
these men are right. They are the wisest and best of the 
world, and they really say — and seem to prove it — that 
the inner life of thought and feeling is higher and more 
important than the outer one of furniture and parties and 
equipages." 

If only the leaders, the successful men of the world, 
would see this, accept it, and act upon it, it would be the 
readiest solution of all our problems of socialism, of capital 
and labor, of overbearing nabobs and restless masses. If 
the leaders would show that they understood the fact that 
the inner world of thought and feeling was the highest, and 
that the outer world was of value only as it made the other 
possible and helped it on, they could thus turn all the 
restless energy of the age into the channels of manly 
endeavor after manly things ; and, since this inner good 
might be open to all, something like our dream of a con- 
tented human progress might be attained. There can 
never be an equality of wealth ; for there is not wealth 



Imter Life and Outer. 



8i 



enough in all the world to " go around." But the riches of 
the inner world might be lavishly given to all comers, and 
no one be the poorer for the distribution. And, in any case, 
however much a man may grasp and hold with his hands, 
he only is rich, as a man, who has the inner possessions of 
a contented and hopeful soul. 

Suppose, then, that religion were able to reach men's 
hearts, their dispositions and desires, and make them what 
they ought to be! Would not the solution of most of 
earth's problems be so attained No longer would there be 
any need of all the elaborate and expensive arrangements 
of check and coercion, by which men are compelled from 
without into right paths of action, — no more armies, no 
more prisons, no more courts or police. And all the ex- 
pense of these might be used in building up that kind of 
external civilization which should be a support and staging 
for the inner, for that which is real in the manly and 
womanly sense. 

Jesus, then, was right in his diagnosis of the disease of 
human sorrow and wrong. When he put his physician's 
finger on the heart, he touched the seat of all the difficulty. 
The heart is the mainspring and motive force of all the 
outward activities of the world. If you are sure that a fig- 
tree is a fig-tree, — fig in core and sap, — you need not stand 
and watch it. You need not bring to bear upon it any form 
of external coercion. It will bear figs of itself. You can 
count upon the harvest. But, if it is a thistle, all your 
external arrangements will not make it bear a single fig. 
Such is Jesus' teaching. Is he not right t 

And, on the other hand, we may find here an easy solu- 
tion of many of the troubles of those who still adhere to the 
old faith. I used to wonder whether or not I was converted; 
and I have seen ministers and others worrying about the 



82 



The Religious Life. 



conversion of some of the noblest people I have ever known. 
They have been very anxious to get at the heart, to see if 
they could find the seeds of salvation there. But, in the 
light of Jesus' illustration, look at the fig-tree again. If 
a tree is really bearing figs, you need not dissect it, take it 
to pieces, to find out if it is a fig-tree in reality or only in 
appearance. The fruit, the external life, if left free to 
develop after its real nature, will decide that point. Whether 
or not you can find out when it became right or how, 
if the heart is right as shown by the outer life, you need not 
look any further. 

And here, also, is a sure test by which you may decide as 
to the value of external religion, — its rites and forms. They 
are of no value in themselves or as being directly pleasing 
to God. In the old days, they fancied that God sat just a 
little way up in the sky, and that he smiled with pleasure 
when he smelt the odor of burning beef rising up to his nos- 
trils from the sacrifice on the altar. But that was hardly 
more childish than much of our modern thought concerning 
our forms of worship. I cannot help thinking sometimes 
that if God were really what we often suppose him to be, a 
great, non-natural man on a throne above the visible sky, 
looking down and listening to what is going on here, he 
must get even dreadfully tired of what we call divine ser- 
vice." Can it be that he likes to listen to our often foolish 
and contradictory prayers ? Does he really like to sit up 
there and listen to a style of repetitious and fulsome flattery 
— be told over and over again how good he is and how great 
he is — that would weary and disgust a really noble man? 
Does he care for our hymns, our robes, our processions, our 
solemn faces that might make one think the most dismal 
thing in life was our thinking of him ? 

To what end, then, is our worship ? It has been said that 



Inner Life and Outer. 



83 



" the truest flattery is imitation." I take it then that, if we 
ever really please God, it is when we are like him. Being 
like God can only be a thing of the heart, — cherishing feel- 
ings of love and good-will that issue in acts of kindness 
and help. Our external religion, then, — our ceremonies, our 
forms, our worships, — can avail only as it affects us, not as it 
affects God. Does this turn it all into what some have 
sneeringly called "spiritual gymnastics," so taking out of it 
the heart and meaning? Let us take an illustralion and see. 
An artist spends hours and days in the Louvre or the Pitti Pal- 
ace in Florence. He bows down before the masterpieces of 
the great of old ; he worships these embodied ideals of 
beauty ; he breathes their air until their power and loveli- 
ness have moulded his taste and aspiration into a likeness 
that it becomes the life-long work of his hand to reproduce. 
Or he goes through a similar process of growth and trans- 
formation through worship of the beauty and glory of nature 
by the sea or under the shadows of the mountains. This is 
all natural and real, is it not ? Anything that he does that 
helps on this development and transformation of his own 
brain and soul and hand is rational and noble. Anything 
he does that fails of this is thrown away. So our worship of 
the divine — the true, the beautiful, the good — is of value 
just in so far as it transforms us into its likeness, puts these 
things into our hearts, and makes them thus a power to 
mould and shape our outward lives. Any form, then, is good 
that helps this. Any form is useless that does not. Any 
form that becomes a substitute for it or stands in its way is 
an injury. Test then your worship by this standard, and 
you need not go astray. 

But now one point more remains to be considered. Is 
this theory of religion a practical one ? Is there any way by 
which the hearts of men may be reached, and these changes 



84 



The Religious Life. 



of feeling wrought which are to issue in the better outward 
life ? The old churches have their ready reply. Some will 
tell you that this, which they call the " new birth," can be at 
any time brought about by the prescribed use of the sac- 
raments. Others will tell you it may be expected as the 
sudden, miraculous result of a special influence of the Holy 
Spirit. We need not stop to argue about these theories 
further than to say that they belong to a world of thought in 
which we do not live any longer. They seem to us small 
and partial, a part of the " childish things " which the grown- 
up world is gradually putting away. But a larger and better 
fact remains. And, when we see a man of a loving spirit, a 
lofty temper, a noble soul, a heart out of which deeds of 
goodness and help spring as naturally as roses bud and 
blossom on their parent bush, we need not trouble to find 
out whether he has been born again, or when, or how. Per- 
haps, being born right in the first place, he has never needed 
it. At any rate, if he ever did need it, the result somehow 
has come. He has a right heart. 

But what has the modern world to say concerning the 
production of such results ? 

In the .first place, we need to fix and keep our attention on 
the fact that the heart is the fountain and source of conduct. 
A man is not what he ought to be, until he chooses the 
good. When he does that, action may be left to take care 
of itself. The work of a true religion, then, ought to be 
directed toward the heart. If a watch does not keep cor- 
rect time, the watch-maker does not think it his business to 
forever meddle with the hands or the dial. He knows the 
difficulty is inside, and he seeks to put that right. Keep to 
this idea, then, as fundamental. 

In the second place, we know that there is a natural law 
of moral reproduction universally at work in the world. 



hmer Life and Outer. 



85 



People naturally grow into the likeness of those ideas 
or those ideals whose company they keep. And, since we 
have the power of choosing the ideas and the ideals that 
the experience of the world has proved to be noblest, we 
may put ourselves under their influence. Criminals can be 
made by criminal examples, either in life or in literature. 
How many sailors have been made by stories of the sea! 
How many warriors by the fascinating descriptions of con- 
quest ! The stories of heroism reproduce heroes. The records 
of the saints who have served mankind are like banyan 
trees, whose branches strike down and become roots of other 
trees. 

Herein lies the significance of noble religious teaching, 
preaching, and worship. They plant the seeds, prepare the 
soil, and create the atmosphere that lead to the growth of 
noble lives. 

Now, all this is just as natural and reasonable in religion 
as are the methods by which art or science or literature 
is made to become a power in the hearts and lives of men. 
No man ever became a great artist in whose heart the 
love of his ideal had not been made dominant. But this 
love can be fostered, trained, and developed. So must the 
student embrace his truth, the writer his ideal. 

How many of you have some precious portrait on the 
wall of your chamber, — the face of some one, living or 
dead, who is to you a living presence and inspiration.'' 
When its eyes seem to look at you, they have power to 
burn and shame out of your soul all evil thoughts or pur- 
poses. You worship their ideals as a devotee might a saint. 
They mould your thought. They shape your life. They 
creep even into your dreams. Do you not, then, see 
how natural it all is, and how mighty } 

Suppose, then, you take home to your hearts an ideal of 



86 



The Religions Life, 



the divine. Let it be to you the embodiment of all truth, all 
beauty, all good. Let it be like a living presence. Learn 
that through these qualities have come all the good, the glory, 
the happiness that man has ever attained ; that this way lies 
all the hope of the future ; that here is the open secret of all 
peace and joy and rest for your own life ; that other things 
pass, while these remain. Learn to worship, reverence, love 
this thought of God. Do you not see that an inward leading 
like this would supersede the necessity for all outward calcu- 
lations and motives, and thus your lives would flow Godward 
as naturally and beautifully as a river runs between its ver- 
dant banks ? 

Such is the work of true religion. Natural, divine, it 
cleanses the fountains of the heart, and so makes clear and 
life-giving all the streams of daily life. 



EVIL AND GROWTH. 



Every man and woman must, after some fashion, deal 
with religion. Religion is so essential, so pervasive a fact, 
that we can no more escape it than we can escape the 
atmosphere. A man's lungs may be disordered, he may 
breathe bad air, he may not breathe enough ; but, in some 
fashion, he must deal with the atmosphere. Every man 
must deal with questions of health. If he be ignorant 
of the laws of life, if he be careless concerning them, if he 
be willing to defy them even, still he deals with them, and 
deals with them in the most vital way. So, whatever your 
theory about religion, or whatever your lack of theory, 
whatever your belief or disbelief, you can no more escape it 
than you can travel outside and beyond the boundary line of 
the world's horizon. 

If a man declares himself an atheist, atheism is a religious 
theory. It is only the obverse side of the current coin of 
belief. So, however you put it, you must deal with it, and 
it will deal with you ; and your success or failure in life 
will very largely depend upon your theory or lack of theory, 
on the correctness or lack of correctness of your religious 
belief. He who will deal with it in any intelligent fashion 
must have a working theory, at least, of life. He must have 
some belief concerning the great problems of the world, — 
the problem of sin, the problem of pain, the problem of 
death. He must be able to give, if not some account of 



88 



The Religious Life. 



them, at least some theory concerning them, that will enable 
him practically to deal with them day by day. He must 
face them ; for they are a part of our human experience. 
And, if he is to be intelligently religious, he must have some 
belief that shall enable him to bear that which is inevitable, 
that shall enable him to escape that which may be escaped, 
that shall enable him to do something, in his own case and 
in the case of others, to help the deliverance of the great 
world from its heavy burdens. In order to do this, he must 
have some belief in an outcome that shall by and by justify 
the process, — a religion or a theory of some kind that shall 
be an inspiration to him, that shall help him to bear what 
must be borne, and that shall enable him to do what he can. 
He must have some hope in his heart that shall sustain him 
in the midst of the practical difficulties of life. Men have 
always felt, from the beginning of time, that pain and sin 
and death were, somehow, unnatural. They have not sub- 
mitted to them willingly. They have felt that they ought 
not to exist, and that the great work of humanity was, in 
some way, to escape from them. Yet, if by the word 
" natural " we mean that which is a part of the observed 
facts of nature, then there is nothing more natural in the 
world than pain and sin and death. It seems to me a very 
significant and hopeful fact that men have thus revolted 
against them, — that they feel that, if the world were what 
it ought to be, they would not exist. They have felt that, 
somewhere in the past, there must have been an ideal 
world v/here they did not exist ; and that, somewhere in the 
future, there should be created an ideal world in which they 
should no longer exist. And this glimpse of the ideal, this 
feeling that there is something better, seems to me one 
of the most significant, one of the most hopeful facts in 
human life. 



Evil and Growth. 



89 



What is this problem ? Let us glance at it under two or 
three phases. 

Take the fact of pain. Are we not all the time asking : 
Why do we need to suffer Why does this pain exist ? 
Why is there so much of it in the world t Why is there so 
little apparent connection between suffering and the moral 
character of those who suffer ? For, sometimes, we see 
some sturdy, healthy, indifferent wrong-doer defying all the 
moral laws and yet going through life in the main free from 
suffering ; while some other person, his conscience keyed to 
the highest ideal of life and truth, is so organized that life is 
one long, tremulous pain. Why is this t 

Take the fact of death. Why do we need to die, if there 
is a future life ? Why not some other method of transition 
from this life to that ? Why need this new birth be accom- 
panied by so much of sorrow, of horror, from which we 
shrink abashed and appalled 1 And then, even if death 
need exist at all, why need it be accompanied with so much 
of pain ? Why need it come before the term of life is lived 
out ? Why are we not permitted to go through this school, 
to finish this earthly education ? Why does death take some 
man in the prime of life, on whom are dependent a wife and 
little children, and leave them to suffer and struggle, perhaps 
to perish, in the midst of untoward circumstances ? Why 
does death take a mother away from her little children, just 
at the time when they seem to need her most ? Why does 
death take one-half the human race before the little feet are 
fairly across the threshold of earthly existence ? Why are 
these little buds here, if they are never to bloom ? Why are 
they permitted to wither before they have unfolded a single 
petal ? 

Then, why is sin here Why this struggle between the 
impulses that would lead us astray and the clear perception 



90 



TJie Religious Life. 



that tells us what we ought to do ? Why this battle between 
the lower and the higher ? What is the need of it ? What 
is the origin of it ? How did it come into the world ? Why- 
need it have come in ? Did it come from the sin of one 
ancestor, or have we all sinned in some pre-existent state ? 
What is sin ? What led the first person to commit the first 
sin ? Did he do it wilfully, understanding what he was 
doing ? Was he overpowered by temptation in the form of 
some person or some wicked devil ? Why did the devil 
wish to tempt him ? Why was there any devil ? How did 
he happen to sin in the first place ? All these questions 
throng upon us, and, if we do not ignore them, demand an 
answer. No man can live for forty, fifty, or seventy years, 
without taking account of them, without dealing with them, 
without trying to make the evil less, or being willing to make 
it more, or in some way becoming involved as a part of the 
great mystery. 

I propose, then, for my task this morning, to ask how 
these questions are ordinarily explained, to examine that 
explanation a little, and then to see if there is any other 
explanation which shall help us to a more rational and more 
hopeful theory of life. 

You know, in the main, the explanation which Christendom 
has offered us. It has given us but one. That one has 
dominated the intelligent world, the majority of it, for 
nearly eighteen hundred years. And, though it be modified 
very largely in the thought of many, yet still, in some phase, 
it forms part of the creed of Christendom. What is this 
explanation ? 

You know the familiar story. I need only hint its outline, 
not for the sake of telling you what it is, but for the sake of 
some comments that I wish to make. 

The human race, it explains, was created originally in the 



Evil and Growth. 



91 



persons of one man and one woman, who were naturally 
endowed with innocence and immortality. There was no 
pain, no sorrow, no death in the Garden of Eden. How did 
they come there ? God laid upon this man and woman a 
command, which they voluntarily broke ; and, as a result, he 
laid upon them as a penalty pain and death. They com- 
mitted the sin ; and this mysterious penalty came from their 
voluntary transgression. Thus, all the evil of the world 
came into existence. 

Now let us look at this a moment. In the first place, we 
know that it is not true. We know, as the result of scientific 
investigation, that pain and death were on this planet un- 
numbered ages before humanity began to be. We know, 
again, that these bodies of ours — • the body of the first man 
as well as of the last one born — are so constituted that 
death is just as natural as life. They bear in themselves the 
limitation of their own continuance. A clock, when it is 
wound up, will run just so long, according to its structure ; 
and then it will run down. Wind it up as many times as 
you please, according to the way in which it is made, and 
the constitution of the materials out of which it is made will 
be its power of endurance. It will wear just so long, and 
then wear out. It will keep time just so long and no longer. 
So these bodies of ours, constructed as they are, — and as 
the first man must have been ; for no one claims any 
difference in the physical constitution, — these bodies must 
die. Death is just as natural as life. 

Then, we know that, were these things not so, we could 
not to-day accept it as true, for the simple reason that it 
seems to us so unjust. We could not believe that any God, 
worthy of love or worship, could have attached such penal- 
ties to such an asserted sin. 

Let us look at it. Here were Adam and Eve, ignorant. 



92 



The Religious Life. 



They had had no experience. How should they know 
what death meant, what sin meant? How should they 
know what pain meant? How should they know what 
this threatened penalty attached to their supposed sin might 
mean, so as to be deterred from the commission of that 
sin? To go farther yet, how should they know that this 
power outside of them, who told them that he had created 
them, had any rightful authority over them? How should 
they understand that they were committing so great a crime, 
when they were doing simply what they pleased, instead of 
following the will of an outside power, whose nature they 
did not know nor comprehend ? 

If we analyze this a little, we shall see that there could 
have been no such deliberate wrong as would justify the 
attachment of any such penalty to the supposed sin. But 
suppose Adam had really understood what he was doing, 
where is the justice of your suffering for it thousands of 
years afterward ? Where is the justice of my nerves tingling 
with pain or my heart being crushed with the loss of those I 
love or my being burdened with the sense of sin, because 
somebody else, ages ago, chose to disobey a supposed 
divine law ? 

I know it is sometimes said — I was taught it in the 
seminary — that the sin of Adam had so stupendous a penalty 
attached to it on account of the infinite dignity and majesty 
of the person against whom he sinned. That is the prin- 
ciple ; and it is a necessary one, if you are going to support 
this theory. Sin is, according to that, not to be measured 
by the intelligence, not by the character of the person 
sinning, but by the dignity and greatness of the person 
against whom the sin is committed. Take a simple illustra- 
tion. Suppose a little child of five years old, in the presence 
of Queen Victoria, should speak slightingly or contempt- 



Evil and Growth. 



93 



uously of her, or deliberately disobey her command. What 
would you think of the justice which should treat the little 
five-year-old child, not in the light of its innocence, ig- 
norance, weakness, and childishness, but of the dignity and 
supposed greatness of the Queen of England and the Em- 
press of India ; that they should measure out a punishment 
as large as the dignity of the queen instead of as small as 
the child ? We could not, then, accept this explanation of 
the origin of sin and pain and evil, even if we did not know, 
on the basis of modern science, that the facts were not as 
they were supposed to be. 

Not only have those who were called heretics felt the se- 
riousness of these objections, but some of the great leaders 
of thought who are still inside the ancient fold. As an illus- 
tration of an attempt to get over this difficulty, I shall call 
your attention to a work, famous in its day, by Dr. Edward 
Beecher, called The Co7iflict of Ages. The purpose of 
that book was to explain just this problem of sin and suffer- 
ing, and to offer an explanation that might be accepted as 
just and reasonable in the modern world. Let us see the 
objections he urges against the common theory. He says 
this : If any man — - Adam, for example — is to be held re- 
sponsible for his actions, so as to be justly liable to punish- 
ment ; if he is to have a fair probation, a fair trial, — then it 
is necessary that certain conditions be observed. For exam- 
ple, he says : Take the case of Adam. He is placed as the 
head of the race at the beginning of earthly time, and his fut- 
ure and the future of the world are to depend on his choice. 
Then, says Dr. Beecher, in order to make this fair and just, 
he must have been endowed with a wisdom which would have 
enabled him to look all down the ages from that hour to the 
end of time, so as to comprehend all the significance of his 
action. He must have been able to say. If I follow this 



94 



The Religious Life. 



road of right, such and such results will follow ; if I take 
this pathway of wrong, such and such results will follow for 
myself and my posterity. He must have been able to com- 
prehend in their entirety the results of his actions. Then 
something else. He must have been perfectly unbiassed, not 
inclined in any way, either to the right or to the wrong. 
Because, if he came with a bias, then that bias would be 
responsible, not he. He must have been able to stand and 
look down the ages, down these two pathways, to compre- 
hend clearly the results of his choice, and to make that 
choice with perfect freedom. Dr. Beecher says that there is 
no evidence that Adam ever had such a trial, that nobody 
else ever had such a trial ; and yet he must have had it, in 
order that the results to the race should be construed as just, 
in the light of reason. 

Let us note one other fact. Suppose Adam did have that 
chance, there are two things I want to say about it. In the 
first place, it is utterly incomprehensible that any rational 
being, standing with these two pathways open before him, 
with a clear insight as to what they meant, and with an un- 
biassed will, should ever have chosen pain and sorrow and 
sin and death and everything evil and horrible instead of life 
and light and peace and joy and happiness and bliss un- 
speakable and everything desirable. It is utterly absurd 
and incredible that anybody should ever have made such a 
choice. In the next place, suppose he had made that choice, 
it does not follow that he had any right to involve me in the 
results of that choice. There is still a difficulty here that it 
is impossible to overcome. 

How then does Dr. Beecher escape the difficulty ? By the 
theory of the pre-existence of the soul. He says that, some- 
where, in some previous life, either Adam for the race, or 
each member for himself, must have had this fair probation. 



Evil and Growth. 



95 



this opportunity for a perfectly free and intelligent choice, 
so that we here to-day may be looked upon as suffering the 
natural, necessary, legitimate results of our own actions. 

You are aware of the fact that Dr. Beecher borrowed this 
theory of pre-existence from the East. Probably one-half 
of the human race to-day holds this theory as the very 
basis of religious life and thought. All the Hindus and 
Buddhists, and nearly all Orientals, hold firmly this theory 
of the pre-existence of the soul. They have been driven to 
it probably in very much the same way as Dr. Beecher was 
driven, — to find a rational way of explaining the facts of 
human life. Suppose you were in Hindustan to-day, and 
had lost some intimate friend or met some financial disaster 
or were suffering pain, what would they tell you? They 
would tell you that you are probably receiving the exact 
penalty that you deserve. No matter how true and lovely 
you may have been since you were born into this life, the 
life you are leading here, whether good or evil, is the exact 
measured result of your previous lives. You are bearing 
to-day just what you ought to bear. The moral of it with 
them is that, under the impulse of this thought, you are to 
live so nobly, so truly, so faithfully, in the midst of the diffi- 
culties that surround you, that the next time you are incar- 
nated you may be born into a better condition. This is the 
theory of pre-existence. 

We have two difficulties in accepting this theory. In the 
first place, we do not know of any adequate reason why we 
should believe any such theory. In the next place, it only 
pushes the difficulty one stage farther back. Suppose we 
skip a thousand or a million years, and go back uncounted 
ages, why did I sin then ? Did I know what I was doing ? 
If I did know, it seems absurd that I should have done it. 
The difficulty remains, only it is pushed farther back. We 



96 



The Religious Life. 



shall find that the same questions arise, no matter how far 
back we go. 

Now, then, I propose to offer you what seem.s to me, at 
any rate, a solution of these difficulties, in the light of the 
science of evolution, the modern theory of human develop- 
ment from lower forms of life. I do not undertake to say 
that I shall be able to clear up all the mystery, and answer 
all the questions, or to make it perfectly satisfactory to you 
any more than it is perfectly satisfactory to me. Only I do 
claim that it is the most rational theory I know of, and 
comes the nearest to explaining pain and sin and death. 
Let us see what this explanation is. 

According to this doctrine, it is no longer a question, but 
a settled fact, that humanity started as the offspring of 
lower forms of life, having been developed from them, start- 
ing half animal, with only dawning humanity in heart and 
brain. It started weak, ignorant, in the midst of all that 
was mysterious, wonderful, and mighty; surrounded on 
every hand by forces not comprehended, forces with which 
it knew not how to deal. It began to live in circumstances 
like these. It must of necessity have progressed tentatively, 
through trials, through experiments. It must, of course, have 
made mistakes ; and these mistakes, since the laws of nature 
are inexorable, would naturally and necessarily be followed 
by the results of pain, disease, suffering of every kind. 

To illustrate : humanity had to learn by experience what 
was good to eat. Trying this and that, it would learn that 
some things were not only not wholesome, but poisonous, 
and would result in death ; that others would bring disease ; 
that other things were good for food, and so might be uni- 
versally partaken of. How else could they learn what to 
eat? In this way, they learned how to deal with all the 
forms and forces of the universe. 



Evil and Growth. 



97 



There is only one other conceivable way. In order to 
have escaped these things, humanity must have been en- 
dowed from the start with infallible knowledge. But think 
what that means. When we talk about knov/ing anything, 
what do we mean ? All knowledge, in the very nature of 
things, is the result of experience. It comes in no other 
way. We have, indeed, the knowledge that has been trans- 
mitted to us from the past ; but that was the result of the 
experience of those who have lived before us. Not only 
knowledge, but the brain, the very organ of knowledge, is 
the result of life through experience. It is developed by 
experience. Was it possible for knowledge to be conferred 
upon us suddenly ? Not omnipotence itself could have done 
it. In the very nature of the case, according to our defini- 
tion of the term, any such supposition is absurd and impossi- 
ble. You remember the two men, or two boys, who were 
discussing what God could do. One of them claimed that 
God could do everything, that there was no limit to his. 
omnipotence, when the other asked, " Do 3^ou think that it 
would be possible for him to make a two-year old colt in 
fifteen minutes ? " There are some things that are absurd 
in their very nature, that are not within the scope or the 
power of even omnipotence itself. Knowledge, then, being 
the result of human experience, cannot be suddenly given to 
man, any more than a plant that takes a week to grow could 
be created in an instant. 

Again, humanity is constructed in such a way that the very 
capacity for pleasure implies a capacity for pain. There is 
no way by which any one can rise above the possibility of 
pain except by becoming insensible to any emotion. The 
only way, then, by which pain can be escaped is through that 
knowledge which enables us to choose or create the condi- 
tions of our life, out of which conditions shall be left those 



98 



The Religions Life. 



things that tend to the production of pain. Humanity, then, 
starting where it did, could not escape pain, disease, death. 
For death to a race beginning Hfe as this race began it, and 
constituted as this race is constituted, is just as natural as 
life ; and it is as necessary as birth. The only real evil about 
death, to my mind, is the fact that it is so often premature, 
that it comes before we have learned the lessons of life, and 
that it is accompanied by so much suffering and horror. 
But this prematurity of death and this needless pain that 
accompanies it, these also can be cured through knowledge, 
and only through knowledge, — through learning how to take 
care of our bodies, how to adjust ourselves to the world 
about us, how to create conditions in which to live free from 
the evils of pain and disease. So much, then, for the ex- 
planation that the theory of evolution has to give us with 
reference to pain and death. 

Let us now look at that apparently deeper problem still, 
the fact of sin. 

What is sin ? What do we mean by it ? Is sin a mistake ? 
A person does not feel remorse for a mistake. It is in its 
very essence a choice between following motives one of 
which is held to be right and the other wrong. It is the 
choice of the lower in us instead of the higher. It is the 
choice of that which we afterward feel has wrought evil in 
the world instead of good. This, so far as we are conscious 
of it, is the essence of sin. The fact of human develop- 
ment underlies this conflict of motives. 

As leading the way to this, let me make this statement. 
If there were living on this earth or on any other planet a 
race of beings who had never made any progress, who were 
utterly incapable of progress, you would never find that they 
used the word "sin," or that they were conscious of the fact to 
which we have given that name. If they were never any 



Evil and Growth. 



99 



lower than they are to-day, if they were incapable of becom- 
ing any higher, if all their life of thought, of sensation, of 
action, were on one dead level, there would, in the nature of 
the case, be no choice between any higher and lower. The 
alternative of right and wrong would never be presented to 
them. There would be no sin. It seems to me, as carefully 
as I can analyze it, that sin necessarily springs out of the 
very fact of progress. We have come up from a lower con- 
dition, from the animal world. We have brought along with 
us animal propensities, passions, instincts, impulses, and 
desires. Up yonder, we get glimpses of heights to which we 
feel we are capable of climbing. We feel that we ought to 
attain those heights, because there is less of pain, of sorrow, 
of evil of every kind there. But there is this struggle be- 
tween this lower life and the higher. We are blinded by 
impulses of passion. We see what we ought to do, but we 
do not do it. This, it seems to me, is the essence of sin. 
This is what we mean when we are talking about it. It 
is the age-long battle between the lower and the higher. 
It springs out of the fact that we are a progressive race ; 
that we have come from beneath, and that our destiny is 
above and beyond ; that we are only in transition, fighting 
along this road. 

Now, what are some of the advantages of this explanation ? 
I do not claim that evolution explains everything. I only 
claim that it offers us a more satisfactory theory of pain, of 
death, of sin, than is embodied in the popular creeds of 
Christendom. What are some of the advantages ? 

I. It teaches us that pain and death and sin are a part of 
the natural order of the world, instead of being something 
unnatural, injected into this order from without by an arbi- 
trary will. If I interpret aright your consciousness by my 
own, I think you will agree with me, when I say I can bear 



lOO 



The Religious Life. 



with patience that which is a part of the natural order of 
life, that which is inevitable, that which is a part of the 
process of growth, a good deal better than I can the inflic- 
tion of an arbitrary will, when I have to feel all the time it 
might possibly have been just as well and even better other- 
wise. I do not like to feel that that which is inflicted upon 
me is a matter of pure caprice and wilfulness, even though 
I am told that that caprice, that wilfulness, are the caprices 
and wilfulness of a God. I can bear with patience and 
cheerfulness that which seems to me a part of the necessary 
order of the world. 

2. This doctrine teaches us a hopeful theory of life instead 
of one of despair. I find the root of this in the fact of 
human growth. Evil is a natural and necessary part of 
a system of growth. I then feel hopeful instead of discour- 
aged. The other theory teaches a downfall and ruin that, in 
large numbers of cases, is to be endless and hopeless. This 
teaches me a hopeful theory of life. I have learned to look 
upon pain and death and sin as signs of cheer instead of the 
opposite. They are a part of the necessary process of 
growth of a race that is developing, that is en route through 
this kind of experience to something higher and better. 
That does not make them good in themselves. But it does 
give us a grand trust that the good is stronger than the evil, 
and that the evil may thus be outgrown. 

3. It suggests another thing that is to my mind marvel- 
lously full of hope. Teaching, as it does, that this is a part 
of the life process of every individual soul, it gives us the 
assurance that some time the process of education, by means 
of this human discipline, will end, and we shall have devel- 
oped out of these evil conditions. I believe we may regard 
it as quite reasonable that pain and sin and death shall be 
somewhere eternal. That is, this process of development, 



Evil and Growth. 



lOI 



by means of pain and sorrow and death, may be going on 
in some planet of the universe forever. But it is not eternal 
in the case of any individual soul. They are eternal just 
as a primary school might be eternal, but new children for- 
ever entering and passing through and graduating from it 
into something higher and better. The outcome is deliver- 
ance, the grand result of the process of training. 

4. This theory relieves God, to our thought, of that burden 
of inexplicable responsibility for what is in itself an essen- 
tial evil. It relieves humanity of a great weight of degrada- 
tion and despair. It crowns life with glory and hope and 
peace, and gives it an outlook and assurance of final tri- 
umph that may well make us all not only willing, but glad to 
fight through the battle for the sake of the victory at the end. 



BELIEF AND TRUTH. 



A PERFECT religious life would mean perfect righteous- 
ness. Or, to drop out the theological term, which, on 
account of its very familiarity, is apt to become trite, and 
so to convey to us no very definite mental picture, it would 
mean complete rightness in every relation of life, — internal 
rightness, external rightness, rightness of thought, feeling, 
will, word, deed. Or, to speak of the different groups 
of relationship into which the total life of ^man may 
logically and naturally be divided, it would be proper 
to say that the work of religion, rightly conceived, is 
to establish right relationships in all directions : first, 
reconciling, mediating, between the conflicting thoughts, 
feelings, passions of the individual, making us what we 
ought to be in our inner life ; second, establishing right 
relationships between self and the neighbor, whether the 
neighbor be conceived of as standing at our elbow or at the 
antipodes ; and, third, establishing right relationship be- 
tween the individual and that Power, however we may 
conceive it, however we may name it, that is not ourselves, — 
that Power that was here before we were born, that will 
be here after we die, the Power from which we have 
come, on which we are dependent every moment of our 
lives, — the universe, God. A perfect religious life, then, 
would be perfectly true and right relationship in all these 
different directions. 



Belief and Truth. 



103 



If we study religion as it was developed in the early 
history of the world among the lower and less civilized tribes 
of men, we shall find — we already have found — that it 
concerns itself almost exclusively with that which I have 
just mentioned as the third relationship, — the relationship 
of man to the power or powers outside of him, leaving out 
of sight almost entirely social relationships and the internal 
condition of the heart. But, as our thought of the divine 
power, life, law, ever broadened, we have come to recognize 
that it is one law of the universe which is in the stars, which 
is in society, which is in the human heart, — one force, one 
power, one right, one justice everywhere. So, now, our 
conception of the religious life is broadened and more in- 
clusive than it was in the earlier stages of human de- 
velopment, and covers the totality of human thought, human 
feeling, human action. 

But, in order that we may live a perfect life, that we may 
be right in ourselves and rightly related to our neighbors 
and to the universe, we must first discover what this reality 
of things is of which I speak, and how we are to become 
adjusted to it. So we find ourselves at the very outset face 
to face with the problem. What is truth, and how are we 
to find it } Before I can perform a religious duty, I must 
know what a religious duty is. Before I can rightly adjust 
myself to my neighbors in society, I must know what that 
right adjustment means, I must know what the present 
relationship is, I must know the method by which I can 
become what I ought to be, how the change is to be brought 
about. 

But this word ''truth" is a word of several meanings; 
and, unless we stop just here for a moment to define our- 
selves, we may fall into more or less confusion on the 
subject. 



I04 



The Religious Life, 



When I say truth this morning, I am not talking about 
truth in the sense of veracity, as when I say, " I speak the 
truth," in talking with a friend or neighbor. I may, so far as 
my intention and purpose go, sjDeak the truth every time I 
open my lips throughout my whole life, and yet have no sort 
of conception of truth in the sense in which I wish to use 
the word to-day. I may be perfectly veracious, and yet be 
utterly mistaken in regard to what my neighbor is and how 
I ought to live in relation to him. Neither, when I use the 
word " truth " this morning, am I thinking of that other 
definition of it, as faithfulness, as loyalty, as when we say 
such and such a man is true to his friends, to his convictions, 
true to a cause which he undertakes to serve, true or loyal 
to his country. A man may be all this, and yet be utterly 
mistaken as to just what kind of a being he is and as to how 
he ought to live. He may be true to his country, and yet be 
entirely wrong in his judgment as to what policy it would be 
best for that country to pursue. He may be true to his 
friend, and yet, with the best intentions, give him advice that 
shall lead him practically astray. I do not mean, then, truth 
in this sense. 

The truth of which I am speaking is this : it is the ques- 
tion whether my thought concerning the reality of things 
outside of myself is an accurate reflection of that reality, 
as, when I hold a mirror up, I question whether its reflection 
is an accurate representative of that which is reflected, or 
when I hold a photograph in my hand and ask whether it is 
an accurate likeness of the person who sat for the portrait. 
So I wish to know, and must know, as preliminary to any 
intelligent religious life, whether the image of thought that I 
carry in my mind as to the realities of life with which I deal 
is an accurate image, a correct reflection, — whether, in other 
words, my thought is true. This is the sense in which I 



Belief and Truth. 



105 



wish to use the word " truth " while I am speaking concern- 
ing it to-day. 

Not long ago, I was listening to an earnest and intelligent 
clergyman of another faith; and he was telling his people 
that the one, first great religious duty of man was the 
complete and unconditional surrender of the heart, the 
brain, and the conscience to God. I agreed with him. I 
believe that is the first great duty of man. But the question 
sprang immediately into my mind as to just what he meant. 
What is God? Who is God.? Is the image that you are 
carrying in your mind while you are speaking an accurate 
representation of this great truth about which you speak t 
I go to hear another clergyman of another faith, who holds 
a position antagonistic to the first one ; and he tells me the 
same, — that the first great duty of man is to submit uncon- 
ditionally, heart, mind, conscience, to God. I believe what 
these words seem to import ; but yet I wish to know what he 
means. I go to a third clergyman ; and I hear him say 
the same. All these three are antagonistic to each other. 
I know that I might go to four or five, or I know not how 
many, and hear substantially the same thing uttered. Must 
I, then, not fall back upon my original question, and ask : 
What is truth ? How shall we find it 1 How shall I be sure 
that I have it ? How shall I regard my mental attitude toward 
this great problem ? One tells me that faith is the first great 
religious duty of man, meaning by that an acceptance of his 
particular scheme or theory of things. I say that faith 
is the first great religious duty of man, meaning by it, 
however, an underlying trust and confidence in the integrity 
of things, — trust that there is reality, truth, somewhere, and 
that the human mind is capable of attaining it, that the 
human soul is capable of loving it, and that man is capable 
of living it out in actuality. But my faith is a hemisphere 



io6 



The Religious Life. 



apart from his. Infinity itself divides one from the other. 
We must go back, then, to our first question, What is truth, 
and how do faith and behef stand related to it ? 

Faith, as I have said, is the first great religious duty of 
man ; but I also hold that, concerning any man's statement 
as to what may be true in any particular instance, that 
scepticism, doubt, is the first great religious duty of man. 
There is no antagonism between these two statements. I 
may have the utmost faith in the universe, in the integrity of 
things, in the integrity of the human mind and its capacity 
for discovering and verifying truth ; and yet I may stand 
in an attitude of utter scepticism and doubt in the presence 
of the old statements as to what this reality may be. I may 
doubt every religious scheme or theory of things that has 
ever been thought out from the foundation of the world, and 
yet be a man of the profoundest and most earnest religious 
faith. 

There are three great attitudes of the human mind possi- 
ble toward this question of religious truth. I propose to 
consider these three so far as time will allow : — 

I. Let us glance at what, perhaps, is commoner than 
either creed or faith, — credulity. Credulity is that which 
most men are cherishing, which they misname faith or creed. 
Credulity accepts unquestioning that which is offered. It 
has never waked up to the realization of the trouble 
and pain of independent thought. It does not comprehend 
what investigation means. It has no conception of how 
to verify a statement, and find out whether it is true or not. 
Credulity accepts those notions that float about in the 
air, that we breathe in as we do the motes that float in the 
sunbeam, that we inherit from our ancestors, that we take 
without question from the newspapers and magazines that 
we read, that we pick up as they drift over the surface 



Belief and Truth. 



107 



of society. What shall we say of this credulity as an attitude 
of mind ? In a little child, prattling in its innocence, sur- 
rounded by those that love and care for and cherish it, this 
credulity is perfectly natural ; and it is only beautiful. 
But it is one of those childish things, fitting and lovely 
in a child, that a man, if he ever becomes one, should 
honestly and earnestly put away with the things that he 
played with in his childhood. This is a world in which 
the wisest men may be mistaken. This is a world, alas ! in 
which hundreds and thousands of people think it for their 
interest to deceive. It is a world in which there are institu- 
tions established that men have become connected with 
in such a way that it seems for their interest to maintain 
them as they are, unquestioned, unchanged. In order to do 
that, they must hold fast and unthinking allegiance to them, 
and do what they can to maintain an unquestioning adhesion 
to them on the part of others. What, then, is credulity in 
the face of facts like these ? For a man capable of inde- 
pendent thought, study, investigation, this credulity, which 
they misname faith, and on which so many times they pride 
themselves, as though it were an indication of childlike trust 
toward the Omnipotent, is nothing short of folly and crime. 
Credulity has misled thousands and thousands of people in 
the past. Credulity has stood in the way of the development 
of the human mind ; for the brain itself, the very capacity 
for thought and study, grows only, as the arm does, through 
exercise. And he who goes through life without thinking 
makes feeble and puny the very organ of thought that has 
been given him, by which to search out and investigate the 
truth. Credulity has stood in the way of the study and 
investigation of truth, persuading people that they were 
already in possession of it, and so making them feel that the 
search was not worth while. 



io8 



The Religions Life. 



This childlike credulity, this unquestioning faith, has been 
one of the most cruel forces that human history has ever 
known. What was it but credulity, — this unquestioning ac- 
ceptance of what one rabbi said, as reported by some other 
rabbi, and so along the whole line of fallible rabbis until 
Moses, — what was it but this, taken without verification as 
the unquestioned word of God, that drove the nails into the 
hands and feet of the Nazarene and hung him to the cross, 
because he dared to hint a larger truth than that with which 
the people were familiar ? What was it but credulity, the 
acceptance of the old, unverified Olympian tales and myths, 
that forced the cup of hemlock to the lips of Socrates, the 
noblest man of his times ? What was it but credulity that 
burned Giordano Bruno, that stopped the lips of Galileo, 
that built the Inquisition and invented every one of its 
nameless tortures ? It was credulity that wrung those 
shrieks and screams of pain from those of whom the world 
was not worthy. Is it, then, a virtue to accept unquestion- 
ingly that which passes as current coin of truth in the marts 
of the world ? Is it an honor to the truth or an insult, — 
this ready acceptance ? There are thousands of people who 
have been trained into the idea that, somehow, it was pleas- 
ing to God for them to close their eyes and open their 
mouths and swallow whatever was offered. Is it an honor 
to the Bank of England for a man to take anything that 
happens to be put into his hands as a genuine bank-note ? 
Or would it not be more to its honor for them to have such 
faith in the real, genuine issues of the bank as to subject 
them to the severest test, knowing that what was genuine 
would not fail ? Suppose some foreign kingdom or country 
was to send an ambassador to Washington, who was to come 
with certain credentials, which were to prove the genuineness 
of his mission and show beyond question the powers with 



Belief and Truth. 



109 



which he was clothed : would it be an honor to that country, 
that kingdom, that ambassador, to refuse to investigate the 
first man who came along or to ask for his credentials, to 
see whether we were giving honor to one who was worthy or 
to one who should be cast out with reproach ? Whatever 
comes from God, whatever is true and real, can stand all the 
investigation that you can bring to bear upon it. It seems 
to me that it is higher honor for us to be perfectly sure that 
it is God and God's truth about which we are thinking and 
speaking and with which we are dealing than through a too 
easy credulity to pour out our love, to put forth our exer- 
tions, and offer freely of our services to that which is not 
God's truth at all. So much, then, for hints concerning- this 
credulous attitude of mind in relation to truth. 

II. Let us now turn to that other group of ideas compre- 
hended under the word " creed," and see what relation this 
bears to the discovery of truth. The only thing we are 
after, remember, is truth ; and a creed is of value only as it 
helps us in the discovery of truth. There is no virtue in a 
creed, whether it have three articles or thirty-nine, so far as 
the creed itself is concerned. Truth is not for the sake of 
the creed, but the creed for the sake of the truth. It is the 
truth, and the truth alone, that we need to discover. There 
are three or four statements which I wish to make concern- 
ing this matter of the creed. 

I. We all have a creed. There are only two classes of 
people that I can think of who can, by any possibility, fail 
to have one. One is composed of persons incapable of 
thought, and the other of persons too careless or too indif- 
ferent to use thought in any such way as to come into 
the possession of any distinct, definite ideas. Any man 
who has a capacity of thinking, and whoever does think, 
has a creed, and cannot possibly escape it. If you say you 



no The Religious Life. 

do not believe in anything, 3^ou give expression there 
to a creed. If you say you do not know what you believe, 
that is your creed. If you say you do not believe it is 
possible for anybody to discover truth, that it is all a matter 
of speculation, that nothing can be fixed, defined, or certified 
as real, that is your creed. You cannot possibly escape 
having one, however great your effort may be. 

2. There is no more shallow talk at the present time than 
that which is so common ; namely, that it does not make any 
difference what a man's creed is. It seems to be a sort 
of symptom of this uncertain, transitional epoch through 
which we are passing, — this foolish delusion, the expression 
of which is so often on the lips of those who ought to know 
better, — that it does not make any difference what a man or 
woman believes. It does not make any difference, provided 
the thing concerning which you have a belief is something 
utterly apart from all practical life. You may believe what- 
ever you choose concerning the back side of the moon, and 
perhaps it will not be a very important matter. You may 
believe whatever you please concerning the method of house- 
keeping in castles in Spain. You may believe whatever you 
choose concerning how things would be, provided they were 
something else than what they are. In reference to those 
matters that by no possibility can touch practical life, it does 
not make any difference what you believe ; but any man 
would be considered foolish or insane, who should make 
a statement like this concerning any of the great affairs 
of human life. If you are out at sea, on board a steamer, it 
would make some difference as to what the captain believed 
concerning an appearance on the waters, — as to whether it 
was a bluff of land, dimly seen through the mist, or only a 
fog-bank, through which he should attempt to sail. If you 
are building a house, it would make some difference what 



Belief and Truth. 



Ill 



you believed concerning the strength of materials, concern- 
ing the law of gravitation, concerning the method in which 
the materials should be used. If you wish to reach a cer- 
tain place, it would make some difference what you believed 
•concerning the route supposed to lead there or the method 
by which you would attempt to reach it. Concerning any- 
thing that touches any human interest, your belief makes all 
the difference between success and failure. If, then, religion 
is not a matter of any practical concern to any human soul, 
then, perhaps, you may rationally settle down to the creed 
that it does not make any difference what a man believes. 
But, if it be something that underlies human life in every 
one of these departments, and that touches the individual 
and social life, in the light of which you can interpret the 
past, in the light of which you must attempt to create the 
future, — if it means anything like this, then it is the most 
important thing in the world what you believe in the depart- 
ment of religious thought and life. 

3. We must get over another delusion that seems to me 
common. There are those who tell us, with great appear- 
ance of authority, that we do not make our own creeds. 
I sometimes hear a man argue the case and say : I am 
not responsible for my beliefs. I see things so and so, and 
I cannot see a fact to be other than a fact. It must 
weigh with me as a fact. My mind is only a pair of 
scales. I put a weight in here, and it weighs half a pound ; 
and I put on the other side a pound weight, and, of course, 
the heavy one will go down and the light will come up. I 
am not responsible for it. If a man had no will, no choice, 
no power of investigation, all this might be true. But 
I dare assert that there is not a man on earth so impartial, 
so unprejudiced, who has looked all over the face of the 
earth, in search for truth, in such an earnest, simple, and 



112 



The Religiotis Life. 



honest wa}^ as to make his mind only a pair of scales, in 
which the weights are put so that he does not care which 
goes up or which goes down. There is not a great religious 
or moral question, with which we must be brought face to 
face, concerning which we do not care. We are prejudiced 
in spite of ourselves. We desire this to be true ; and we 
hope that that is not true. Is this not correct in regard to 
all, perhaps, but one in a hundred thousand ? Is it not 
also partly true in the case of this one exception ? 

Again, is it not true that the most of us choose the mate- 
rials out of which we will construct our creed ? You choose 
what papers you will read, what magazines you will study, 
what theological and scientific works you will devote your 
leisure to, what persons you will hear lecture, what others 
you will not listen to. In other words, you choose the mate- 
rials out of which you will construct your creed, and many 
times under bias of prejudice. You are influenced by your 
own moral character. You desire to find this true and 
that untrue. Here comes in the matter of responsibility. 
In so far as these things are so, in so far we are responsible 
for our creed. People say to me, on every hand : I have 
been trained so and so ; and I love my church. My mother 
believes so and so ; and her beliefs are sacred to me. My 
father held such ideas ; and I am attached to them. And, 
therefore, — what.'* I choose to consider them true. Do not 
we, then, have some power over the manufacturing of our 
own creeds ? We must remember that we are not honest, 
not real genuine truth-seekers, until we have trained our- 
selves into a willingness to look all over the world, and just 
as far as possible to discover all the materials that ought to 
enter into the making up of our opinions and of giving them 
their just weight. When we have done this, then we may 
talk about our minds being a pair of scales, but not before. 



Belief and Truth. 



113 



4. The real creed of any man or woman is not that which 
he writes down in a book, not that to which he subscribes 
when he becomes a member of a church or rehgious society : 
his real creed is the one that he lives by. You live out what 
you really care for, what you really believe. A man's true 
creed is only an accurate reflection of his character; and 
his character may have more to do with the making of his 
creed than all other things combined. 

You will see from what I have already said in regard to it 
that creed may or may not be a help toward the discovery 
of the truth. Your creed does not necessarily represent the 
truth of things. You have no right to think that it does, 
unless you have made a comparison and tried to verify it. 
This creed w^hich you have is yours ; it represents that which 
you have learned to care for ; it is the conventional repre- 
sentation of what you regard as proper ideas to be held. 
But this creed may stand squarely in the way of your dis- 
covering the real truth. You think you have it all : there- 
fore, you are not willing to investigate, not willing that it 
should be tested, not willing to bring it out into the light 
and lay it alongside the standard of verifiable truth. A 
creed we cannot help having ; but it should be made only 
a starting-point for investigation. 

III. Now, let us turn to one other point, and see what we 
mean by faith in the religious sense. Faith, in any true 
sense of that word, is not credulity, it is not creed. Faith 
has no sort of necessary connection with that which you be- 
lieve as an intellectual statement of a proposition. Faith is 
the underlying trust in the integrity of the universe and the 
integrity of the human mind. What is it based on ? Is it 
something all in the air, something without reason beneath 
or behind it ? Faith, in the true sense of that word, is the 
result of the experience of all the past. It is the belief 



114 



The Religious Life. 



resulting from these ten thousand special experiences organ- 
ized into an instinct that makes us trust in the reality of 
things ; that makes us believe that there is truth some- 
where, and that we can find it. It is the underlying basis 
of all rational thinking and all rational living. It has the 
grandest reason for existence of any persuasion of which 
we can come into possession. It is not confined to religion. 
People are accustomed to talk about faith as though it 
were set off in that airy part of our living which we label 
" religious." 

A statesman, if he be a true statesman, lives by faith as 
much as does a prophet or a martyr. The statesman has 
never yet seen realized in the midst of human society his 
ideal condition of human affairs. But, as the result of the 
experience of all the past of humanity, noting where man 
began the processes by which he has come to the present 
moment, and what he has achieved, he holds firmly, he has 
a belief or faith in the possibility of realizing these grander, 
better ideals of human society that have never yet existed. 

The artist lives by faith. He has never seen " the light 
that never was on sea or land." You ask him what beauty 
is. Perhaps he will not be able to define it for you ; or, if 
you tell him you do not believe there is any beauty, he may 
not be able to demonstrate it as a fact. But, as the result of 
all the best experience of man, this instinct, this faith, is 
deep down in his soul ; and, as he looks at his bit of marble, 
he believes that, whether he is capable of doing it or not, 
some artist, whose dream is perfect and whose hands are skil- 
ful, could work out of this intractable material a perfect ex- 
pression of perfect beauty. He believes that on the rough 
canvas, with common pigments, some hand might outline 
the ideal of the perfect human face. It never yet has been 
on canvas ; but he has this faith in his soul, born of the ex- 



Belief and Truth. 



115 



perience of the past, which is the inspiration and the motive 
force of all his attempts, the power of all his life. 

There is not a man who lives and works more by faith 
than does the man of science. He knows only a little pf 
this world around him. Yet he dares by faith to construct 
an invisible universe beyond the reach of the most powerful 
glass, and to tell you of suns and systems that no eye has 
ever seen. He dares to talk of laws in the distant stars, of 
forces and powers that control the movements of heavenly 
bodies that are unseen. And then, by this same process of 
faith, he reaches beyond the limits of the visible toward the 
littlenesses of infinity. Sure of his ground, at every step 
believing that the same laws, the same forces that he ob- 
serves right here in this little spot with which he is familiar, 
reach out beyond the limits of the known, and would be 
found true in the atoms or the stars. This is not unreason- 
able. His brain, his power of thought, has been moulded 
by the experience of this same universe in the past ; and he 
believes in the unity, in the power of life all through, and so 
trusts that the questions concerning these great problems of 
the human intellect may some time be reached, if it be not 
for a thousand years. Faith, then, is this underlying trust 
in the integrity of things. 

Now let me recall your minds to a statement that I made 
at the outset, — that there is no sort of antagonism between 
this deepest, grandest faith of the human heart and the 
most outright blank scepticism of the intellect. I trust in 
the universe, in God, in the future : what has that to do 
with the question whether I believe that John wrote the 
Gospel that goes by his name ? Yet, if I dare to doubt the 
latter, in the face of the great religious authorities of the 
world, they call me an infidel. An infidel is a man with no 
faith, not a man who dares to question whether a particular 



ii6 



The Religious Life. 



scheme of things that you have wrought out is a perfect 
copy of the original truth or not. There is no sort of con- 
nection, then, necessarily between faith and scepticism or 
doubt. Doubt as much as you will these human schemes. 
Nay, it is your duty to doubt them until they are verified. 
There is more faith in this kind of doubt than there is in 
that credulity which accepts, that timidity which dares not 
question, lest it should find everything hollow and unreal. 

Bask, then, in this credulity, if you will, if you enjoy it, in 
the presence of your little circle of friends. Be a child with 
one whom you have proved for years that you can trust. 
Do not insult him by asking proof for any common state- 
ments. Credulity is beautiful here. But do not let it dare 
to usurp a place to which it has no right. Let faith sink 
deeply into your hearts ; let it furnish you a standing ground 
from which you may work from the known toward the un- 
known, always in accordance with the laws of things already 
discovered. Let your creed represent the highest thought of 
to-day, but do not dare to include in it anything that you 
have not tried or verified. 

Do not be frightened because people tell you your creed 
is very brief. I remember the case of a clergyman who 
said once to a man who dared to be classified with doubters, 
"If you believe no more than you say you do, you could 
write your creed on your thumb-nail." So be it. If I do 
not knov/ any more than I can write on my thumb-nail, I 
will not write any more. I will not lie. I will start with a 
creed that I can believe : I will start with that which I know 
is true, and reach out beyond that, however slowly. 

Hold your creed as representing that which you know or 
have reason to believe is true. Keep it ever subject to 
revision. Accept whatever comes with the credentials of 
truth. But, above all, remember that this truth, after you 



Belief and Truth. 



117 



have attained it, is only the first step. You cannot take any 
step rightfully or hopefully, until you know the truth. But 
an intellectual knowledge of the truth is of no avail. Sup- 
pose the whole world knew the truth, and yet stood still with 
folded hands. What would it benefit any one ? A knowl- 
edge of the truth is the first thing necessary ; but religion is 
not something simply to have, it is something to be done. 
Find out the truth, then, concerning your inner life, concern- 
ing the relation in which you ought to stand to your fellow- 
men, concerning the relation in which you ought to stand 
toward the infinite Power that compasses us around ; and 
then, when you have found out the truth, incarnate it. Do 
it. Work it into institutions and deeds. Suppose you know 
the truth concerning the perfect kingdom of God on earth, 
of what avail is that ? Go on, and build that kingdom. 



THE GROWTH OF SECULARISM. 



If you look out over our American Protestant world, you 
will observe that it is divided into two uneven, unequal 
parts. One part is called secular, and the other is called 
sacred. You will notice also, although this was not always 
the case in the history of the world, that the secular is by a 
good deal the larger part. 

To illustrate what I mean, consider the fact that there are 
places sacred in the esteem of the Protestant world. There 
is one whole land that we are accustomed to speak of as the 
" Holy Land," because it is supposed that the people who 
resided there had been selected especially by God to be the 
channel of his divine revelation to man. Hence, the 
history of this people is a sacred history, the events in 
its career are sacred events, its prominent characters are 
sacred characters. But, besides this, there are in the 
Protestant world other sacred places, churches especially, 
that have been consecrated to God. Then there are not 
only sacred places, but sacred times, — certain days set 
apart and looked upon as being unlike other days, days 
in which it is not fitting to live as on ordinary days. In the 
Protestant world, these are reduced at the present time 
to very few, — practically, only one day in seven, our Sab- 
bath, or Sunday. There are not only sacred times and 
places, but there are certain kinds of actions that are 
looked upon as sacred in a lesser way, such as church 



Growth of Secularism. 



119 



attendance and attendance at prayer-meetings. Those which 
are regarded as specially sacred rites or actions are those 
that go by the name of the sacraments, two in particular, — 
baptism and the Lord's supper. Then there are sacred 
books, a certain number of them bound together in one 
volume, — the Old and New Testaments. There is no reason 
that we know why there should not be more than these ; 
but, in the Protestant world, this one book stands in a class 
by itself. It is sacred. Other books that depend upon it, 
that treat of its doctrines and of the customs and ways of 
the people about which it is written, are looked at as half 
sacred. But all th-e rest of the literature of the world is 
regarded as profane, — that is, as common and unsacred ; 
for that is the meaning of the word "profane " as thus used. 
Then there are also sacred persons, certain ones that are 
called saints. This word, among Protestants, is now ordi- 
narily applied only to the apostles, — the immediate com- 
panions and followers of Jesus. These, then, are regarded 
as sacred, — things set apart, looked upon with peculiar rever- 
ence, as holy, as especially related to God and the religious 
life. All the rest of the world is common, human, profane. 

There is one other aspect of this subject that we ought to 
look at, to note the tendency and drift of the modern world. 
If we go to those religious bodies that, from our stand-point, 
are the least progressive, — the ritualistic, the High Church, 
and the Catholic bodies, — those that represent more closely 
the thought of the past, that are less conformed to the 
present order of things, we find that the number of sacred 
places and times, of sacred actions and books and per- 
sons, is very much larger than in the ordinary Protestant 
world. On the other hand, if we come to those who call 
themselves rationalists or, still farther, to those who an- 
nounce that they are simply secularists, we find that the 



I20 



TJie Religious Life. 



number of these sacred things is constantly diminishing, 
until the secularists proclaim that they hold nothing as 
sacred in this peculiar sense. The secularists have estab- 
lished themselves as a kind of religious body in England, 
organizing as a sect. They would not call themselves re- 
ligionists ; but they have a scheme of things, an outline 
of human life, that is a substitute for religion, even if it 
be not called by that name. We note, then, this thing : 
that, the nearer we get to the thought of the past, the larger 
the number of the places, the times, the actions, the books, 
the persons that are called sacred ; and, the farther we come 
toward what promises to be, so far as we can see, the domi- 
nant thought of the future, the less of this we find, — that is, 
the domain of the sacred is becoming continually narrower, 
and the domain of the secular is on the increase. 

Now, as we go back, we find the Catholic Church, through 
the Middle Ages, approximating to the condition of things in 
the pagan Roman world. In the latter, however, we shall 
find the number of sacred persons, places, things, books, 
persons, is larger still. Almost all life is covered by this 
conception of the interference, the activity of some divine 
agency. There is less of what we call natural and more and 
more of what we call supernatural. 

Let us glance at two or three phases of Ancient Roman 
life as illustrating these. 

When the city of Chicago was founded, it was connected 
with no religious idea. It simply grew, as we say, by 
natural causes, under purely natural influences. As popula- 
tion extended west, it was found that here was a proper 
place for a city ; and, more and more, people took up land 
there, and built houses and stores and banks. It became a 
great railroad centre ; and, in this way, it has grown as 
naturally as an oak-tree grows. There were no religious 



Growth of Secularism. 



121 



services connected with its foundation, no divine religious 
idea connected with the city life. How different from all 
this was the foundation of the city of Rome ! When Troy 
was destroyed, -<:Eneas took the gods of Troy into his pe- 
culiar charge and keeping. Hector is said to have come to 
him in a vision, and told him that he was divinely appointed 
to take the gods and go in search of a new home for them. 
So he started on his voyage of wandering, and, as a sacred 
duty, selected the site of Rome to be the home of the gods 
of which, for the time, he was the guardian and protector. 

So the city was founded with religious rites, its establish- 
ment was a religious act ; and the sacred fire which had been 
brought from Troy, and which had never been quenched for 
a moment, was placed in the temple of Vesta, — a temple 
under the care of a set of priestesses that were looked upon 
with peculiar veneration. Every Roman believed that, if 
anything occurred to pollute this temple of Vesta, or if by 
any unforeseen accident the fire was allowed to go out, it 
would mean unspeakable calamity to the city and to the 
future of the Roman world. And not only the city, but 
every home that was established, was established as a relig- 
ious act ; and the hearth-fire was looked upon as a divinity, 
in the presence of which was carried on the household wor- 
ship. And the wedding, and the birth of the child, and 
death were supposed to be under the care of some god or 
goddess whose duty it was to look after these great crisis 
periods of human life. The Romans never thought of be- 
ginning a great war except as a religious act. They must 
read the signs, so as to find out the will of the gods, before 
they could undertake a battle. The launching of a ship was 
accompanied by religious ceremonies, and religious services 
preceded every new voyage. So every one of the important 
acts of life was looked upon as in some way connected with 



122 



The Religions Life. 



the mysterious personal interference, the supervision, of 
some one of the deities. Life then was sacred at every 
turn, all its great events sacred. Still, there was a certain 
area of life unconnected in their thought with the divine ; 
and I suppose in that ancient world the division between the 
worldly and the religious was even sharper than it is to-day. 
Now and then, you will hear a man in the modern world ex- 
cusing himself for questionable conduct, although he may be 
a professing Christian, with the words, " Religion is one thing, 
and business is another." In that old world, that was true in 
a more emphatic sense; for the gods, provided a man was 
faithful to the rites and ceremonies which they were supposed 
to have appointed, cared very little how he behaved. The 
deities took very little cognizance of personal morals. One 
was permitted to do about as he pleased, provided he were 
faithful in his religious rites. 

Bring this home to Boston to-day. Suppose we had a god 
who was the patron of Boston. Suppose we set apart a cer- 
tain number of our citizens, such as our aldermen, and made 
it a part of their duty, yea, even a chief part, to sacrifice at 
noon of each day, to eat together a common meal looked on 
as sacred as the Lord's Supper is in the Catholic Church ; 
suppose that we believed that on the rigidity and regular per- 
formance of these duties the prosperity of our city depended, 
and that we must hold them to a rigorous performance of all 
these rites and ceremonies. If you can realize a condition 
of things like that, you will get a clear idea of how it was 
looked on in Rome, and in all the great cities of the ancient 
world. Each had its own god and ceremonies; and the 
division was hard and fast between the sacred and secular 
parts of their lives. 

Now, I wish to note four or five points concerning that 
division ; for its significance is very important : — 



Growth of Secidarism. 



123 



1. It goes along with, and is a necessary part of, that 
theory of things which looks upon God as being outside and 
separate from nature. If God is everywhere and in all 
things, then everything will be sacred, or it will be secular, 
whichever you choose to call it. God, then, in the ancient 
world, and down to recent times, was looked upon as 
entirely outside of what we call the natural world. Jupiter 
held a sort of court on the summit of Olympus, in Greece. 
He had nothing to do with the ordinary affairs of daily life, 
except as he chose arbitrarily to interfere with them. He 
had nothing to do with the growing of the crops, nothing to 
do with a storm at sea, nothing to do with the carrying 
out of any mercantile plan, or with daily life or life in the 
family. He was as much external to the life of Greece as 
the President of the United States is to our life in America, 
except so far as he chose to come in to interfere specially, to 
do some arbitrary act and attach to it some arbitrary penalty. 

2. Since God, or the gods, have been looked upon as ex- 
ternal to nature and the ordinary life of man, this ordinary 
life has been regarded as common and profane. It has had 
nothing divine, nothing essentially sacred or holy connected 
with it, because holiness and sacredness have been regarded 
as connected especially with the gods. 

3. God has always been represented as a being who has 
come into the affairs of human life and selected certain 
places, certain days, certain actions, certain books, certain 
persons for himself, claiming them as his, demanding that 
they be used in certain ways for his own honor. These 
have been regarded as dedicated to him. 

4. You will notice that it logically and necessarily follows 
from this that the divine, the sacred, in human life has 
always been looked upon as being the arbitrary, the occa- 
sional, the mysterious, the especial, not the regular, the or- 



124 



The Religious Life. 



dinary. The ordinary on-going of the world was common, 
profane. God had nothing special or necessarily to do with 
this order. He might interfere here and there, and put his 
finger ujDon this or that and say : " This day is mine, you must 
not work on it. Other days you may do as you will, but this 
is my day." He might choose to inspire somebody to write 
a book. Just the same or similar truths may be contained 
in other books ; but he could say, " This is my book." He 
might choose certain persons, and consecrate them to special 
service, and say, " These are my saints, my priests : you must 
give them a reverence that you do not to other people ; you 
must pay special regard to their word." And so through the 
whole round of places, persons, things, God, it is said, has 
come in, in this arbitrary way. He has chosen and set his 
mark upon and declared as sacred those things which he 
chose so to declare. 

5. It follows, in view of the explanation that I have 
given, that the sacred things of this world have not neces- 
sarily been those things that are inherently and vitally 
connected with human welfare and happiness. They have 
not sprung out of the wants and needs, the hopes and 
aspirations, of men. They have been interjected into human 
life from without. Why, for example, should God not have 
chosen some other day than the first of the week for a holy 
day ? There is no reason why he should not have chosen 
Thursday as well as Sunday, in the nature of things. If he 
had, it would have been wrong, according to this theory, to 
have done certain things on Thursday ; but, on Sunday, one 
could have done what he chose. There is no reason as 
touching the welfare of man why that particular day should 
have been chosen. 

So, in regard to the sacraments, there is no reason in the 
nature of things why some other ceremonial should not have 



Growth of Secularism. 



125 



been selected as well as the breaking of bread and the 
drinkmg of wine ; and, if God had chosen some other one, 
that would have been the sacrament, and we never should 
have had any ideas of holiness connected with breaking 
bread or drinking wine. The choosing of these things was 
arbitrary ; and the penalty attached to disobedience is arbi- 
trary. Suppose I disobey the law of the Sabbath or pay no 
regard to the sacrament. It is not the same thing as though 
I break my arm, or eat something which is unwholesome, 
or pursue some course of thought that vitiates my brain so 
that it becomes useless. These would be purely natural 
penalties. But, in the other case, God says in an arbitrary 
way, " I will punish you, if you do so and so." It is not a 
vital, necessary thing, springing out of human nature. 

So much for explanation as to what these sacred things 
are and how they have come to exist. But, now, as the 
result of modern investigation, the development of knowl- 
edge, the growth of science, we stand face to face with what 
is a very great problem. As I intimated at the outset, the 
domain of the sacred is perpetually growing narrower, as the 
world grows wiser, as the spirit of science becomes more 
diffused, and the domain of that which is called secular is 
perpetually growing larger. Science is, every year, wresting 
from the kingdom of the sacred some new province, and an- 
nexing it to the secular country. 

Let us see what this process means and how it is going 
on. I said that the sacred things of the old world are 
arbitrarily dependent on an exceptional, external power, not 
inherent in the nature of things. They are dependent on 
things which are connected with occasional events, with the 
mysterious, the supernatural, the unknown. The progress 
of science means a perpetual widening and widening of 
the domain of the known. It brings more and more of the 



126 



TJie Religious Life. 



universe within the limits of recognized order and law. It is 
narrowing the limits of the mysterious, the unknown, the 
arbitrary. It is teaching us, day by day, that things we 
supposed were arbitrary are natural, only we did not under- 
stand them before. 

Let us note a few examples of this process, and see how nat- 
ural it is and how rapidly it is growing. Down to and since 
the day of the discovery of the laws of planetary motion 
there was no way by which men could conceive how the 
planets were held in their orbits and how their motions were 
produced. These motions, it was supposed, were produced 
by some supernatural power. Even Kepler, who discovered 
the laws of the motions of the planets, still believed, up to 
the day of his death, that there was an angel residing in 
each one of these heavenly bodies, guiding its course and 
controlling its revolutions. He could understand no natural 
way of explaining their movements. You will remember the 
case — and it is illustrative of this whole theme — of Anax- 
agoras in ancient Athens, who promulgated the theory that 
the sun was not a god, but a ball of fire, and the horror of 
the citizens of Athens at what they regarded as his irreligion. 
He was condemned to death ; and, although that sentence 
was finally commuted to perpetual banishment through the 
intercession of Pericles, the foremost man in Athens, yet 
even he could do no more for him. Until that time, it was 
believed — and believed by the masses of the people for a 
long time after that — that the sun was a god, riding in a 
chariot of flame along the daily road-way of the sky. You 
will notice that Kepler's theory is only a step in advance of 
this. Newton was the first to give us a natural account of 
the movement of the heavenly bodies, by the discovery of the 
law of gravitation. This accounted for their movements. 
It was considered daring impiety on the part of Newton, an 



Growth of Seculmdsm. 



\2J 



attempt to dethrone God as the ruler of the universe and to 
establish a law in his place. According to the old theory of 
religion, he had made that attempt. He was the most 
daring antagonist of the Almighty that the world, up to that 
time, had ever seen. 

Since that day, the process has been going on. In old 
times, the rainbow itself — ^it is plainly declared so in the 
Old Testament — was regarded as a standing perpetual mir- 
acle ; not the effect of the sun shining on certain drops of 
water, but as a sign that God would not again send a flood 
upon the earth. The explanation of earthquakes and volca- 
noes used to be that there was a giant down under the earth, 
and that this quivering and outpouring were occasioned by 
his turning over from one side to the other to get in an easy 
position, or by his struggles to get free from his bonds. 
In a book published, if I mistake not, within the present 
century, the revolution of the earth was attempted to be ac- 
counted for on the theory that hell was in the centre of the 
earth, and that the world was made to move by the struggles 
of the damned within its bowels, as a circular cage is made 
to revolve by the squirrel running around within it. This 
explanation was given in all seriousness. I speak of it to 
show you how very modern are some of these extravagant 
theories as to the way natural events were to be explained. 

But this process has gone on until earthquakes, tempests, 
and pestilences, and all these things that were accepted as 
the arbitrary action of the Divine Being, are recognized as 
perfectly orderly and accounted for by natural processes. 
And the conviction is growing that this process is to go on 
still more ; that there is no end to it, but that it will continue 
just as far as human investigation can reach. Almost every 
intelligent man believes that that which is at present mys- 
terious and unknown is just as orderly, just as natural, as the 



128 



The ReligioiLs Life. 



things which we are most familiar with, precisely as every 
such man believes that, if some one could thoroughly ex- 
plore the continent of Africa, he would find the same forces 
at work there as in Massachusetts. He does not believe 
that there is anything unnatural or supernatural in Africa, 
because it has not been explored. So the result of the study 
of the past is that that which is mysterious, because it is un- 
known, is just as orderly as the things which are known, and 
that, by and by, the whole world, the universe itself, will all 
be regarded as just as natural as the rising or the setting of 
the sun. 

We, then, are face to face with this question : What is to 
be the outcome ? Is religion to die out ? Is the sacred en- 
tirely to pass away? Is the world all to become secular? 
For this process is going on, not only in regard to natural 
events. People no longer believe that there is any inherent 
sacredness in any place. They no longer regard any one 
action as especially sacred. Thousands of the most intelli- 
gent and best people are coming to believe this. They have 
looked through all the sacred books of the world ; and they 
believe that they can be accounted for on purely natural 
principles, as the outcome of the religious life of man. And 
so all these different things that have been regarded as 
peculiarly sacred are coming to be explained in accordance 
with natural principles. What is to be the end, then ? Is 
secularism at last to reign supreme in the universe, and the 
religious to become something which is merely remembered 
as a part of the superstition of the world's childhood ? 

The answer to that question wdll depend entirely upon 
your definition. If religion is to maintain its stronghold 
only in an arbitrary manner, only in the unnatural, the su- 
pernatural, the mysterious, the unknown, the occasional ; if 
it is inconsistent with the natural order of the natural world, 



Growth of SeciUarism. 



129 



then we may as well give up the contest, and admit that 
religion is to become less and less, and finally to die away. 
For I believe that there is no thoroughly educated man in 
the modern world, educated and free at the same time, but 
believes that this natural order is to go on extending itself 
until it covers all things. 

Let us ask another question then. Religion is certainly 
to die out, unless we can find room for it in the natural, in 
the orderly, in the lawful, in the every-day affairs and every- 
day things of the world and of human life. Is there any- 
ground for it there ? I want you to note two or three of the 
essential things in religious thought and life ; and then I 
want to ask you to consider whether there is not even more 
room for them in the world of natural law than there is in 
the world of miracle and caprice. 

What are the essential things in religion ? Is a miracle 
essential to religion ? No. Is arbitrary action essential to 
religion ? No. Is anything supernatural essential to relig- 
ion ? I cannot see that it is. What is essential ? Let us 
examine the human heart for a moment in its relation to the 
outside world, and see what we would call the religious atti- 
tude of a man. 

I. I should say first that a religious man must be reverent 
and worshipful. Is there any ground, any reason, in the 
modern world for reverence and for worship } It seems to 
me that this modern conception of the universe gives us a 
thousand-fold more range and sweep for these sentiments 
than were ever dreamed of in the history of thought before. 
Our conception of this universe, of the power manifested 
through it, of human nature and the possibilities of human 
life, — of truth, of beauty, goodness, of order, — are not these 
things unspeakably grander than they ever were before ? 
And does not the pure human heart, the sane intellect, the 



I30 



The Religions Life. 



thoughtful mind, bow with reverence, with a sense of adora- 
tion and admiration, — and this is the soul of worship, — in 
the presence of these things, as never before ? And, if you 
want mystery as an element of worship, never was so much 
mystery in this old world as is given us by just these modern 
discoveries, that make us believe in an infinite order. The 
slightest, tiniest thing with which we can deal is linked in 
with the warp and woof of the infinite. And, if we could 
solve the smallest, we could hold the mightiest in our grasp. 
Mystery, instead of resting on the occasional and the arbi- 
trary, faces us at every turn, more insoluble by as much as we 
know the more. 

2. I would next, as an essential element in the religious 
attitude of man, place the sense of dependence, — the feeling 
that we are in the presence of an Infinite Power that has 
given us life, on which we depend every moment, by whose 
laws we live. Is this taken away by the modern world 
Rather is it immensely magnified, until the God of human 
thought, the God on whose will we depend, is no longer 
super-human man on the top of a mountain. Rather is he 
the infinite life and spirit that breathes in the zephyr, that 
fans our brow in the summer, that sweeps in the immensity 
of its circuit the star, so far away that it has taken millions 
of years for its light to traverse the vast abyss. This is the 
power, named or unnamed, uncomprehended because infi- 
nite, — this is the power on which human life depends. 

3. Again, religion is the recognition of the law of right, 
the law of duty, the law of life, inexorably dominant, uni- 
versal, from which there is no escape. Is that lessened by 
the discoveries of the modern world? Rather is it in- 
finitely increased in its reach and its complexity. It clasps 
us around on every hand, as does the air, touching ever}^ 
infinitesimal portion of our body, and being the very con- 



Growth of Secularism. 



131 



stituent power of brain and thought, the very life-blood of 
the heart, the very quintessence of our conception of life, 
the very breath of the spirit. This power touches us on 
every side, besets us behind and before, and lays its hand 
upon us. We can no more escape it than we can escape 
the atmosphere. 

4, Then, there is ground in this modern thought for trust, 
for hope, for aspiration. There is reason, as there never 
was before, for personal consecration to the highest ideal 
and the noblest conception of life. There is ground for 
religious devotion, which is the essence of sainthood, such as 
the ancient world never dreamed. So it seems to me that, 
so far from the elements of essential religion being in danger 
of dying out, because they are recognized as natural every- 
where, we are face to face with the inevitable fact that these 
things are coming closer to us and touching us with a more 
inexorable grasp. 

Are, then, special sacred things to fade out of our life ? 
Is there to be no more a sacred place, a sacred time, sacred 
actions, a sacred book, sacred persons Nay, even here I 
would turn the tables on what seems to be a part of the 
popular thought, and say that the sacraments of human life 
are to be increased in number, beauty, glory, and power, 
rather than lessened. Only, we are to get rid of those old, 
arbitrary, artificial ideas of sacraments, and are to recognize 
those things that are inherently, naturally, vitally sacred. Are 
not our lives, though we have not learned this as we ought 
to have done, filled full of the memories of holy places, 
of places connected in our thought with the noblest deeds 
and highest hopes and kindling aspirations, the turning- 
points of our careers, — the places where the highest and the 
noblest in us was born ? Are there not in our memories 
numberless sacred hours, hours consecrated to some noble 



132 



The Religious Life. 



truth, hours given to the service of some worthy friend, 
hours connected with the highest and best things in us, — not 
observed by any rite or outward institution perhaps, but 
none the less real sacraments of the best and divinest life 
within us ? Will there be any more sacred days ? Are not 
our memories full of these ? Are there to be no sacred 
books ? They tell us that we rationalists dethrone the 
Bible. Nay, we lift it from its artificial pedestal, on which 
it has enjoyed what seems to us a sort of mock divinity. 
We take it from the position that it has held in the hearts of 
men ; and eliminating all that is evil and contradictory in it 
— for they are there — we lift it up to an equal eminence 
with those things that are clearest, highest, divinest. We 
demand that the thing be looked at for what it is, that the 
real sacrament be recognized. Then we add to them, grad- 
ing them according to their importance in the development 
of our spiritual lives, other books, holding any book sacred 
that has told us a new message from God, that has given us 
a new truth, that has kindled in us a new aspiration, that 
has taught us some higher duty, that has made it easier for 
us to bear sorrow, that has come to us as a friend in dark- 
ness and trial. We shall have a library of sacred books, not 
one alone, counting all sacred that tell us truth and help us 
to live. 

Are there to be no more sacred men and women ? 
Sacred men and sacred women, are they not those that have 
ministered to us in our hours of necessity ; that have com- 
forted us in sorrow ; that have lifted us up when we have 
been bowed down ; that have, by a word or a hand-clasp, 
perhaps unconsciously, made it easier for us to believe in 
ourselves, in immortality, in God? These have been to us 
the ministers and angels of the divine. Are there not such 
men and women that we know to-day, and that we remember 



Growth of Secularism. 



133 



with a tear dripping upon our cheek or silently falling in our 
hearts, sacred to us forevermore ? What is sacred, what is 
holy, what is hallowed, if not these ? Because they link 
us by natural processes with the divine, instead of being 
arbitrary, because they are under the law of our daily life, 
are they not sacred ? 

Let me close by quoting to you, as typical of the whole 
idea, and as representing my meaning in one direction, and 
so illustrating it in all, the closing lines of Thomas Camp- 
bell's " Hallowed Ground " : — 

" What's hallowed ground ? 'Tis what gives birth 
To sacred thoughts in souls of worth ! 
Peace ! Independence ! Truth ! go forth 

Earth's compass round ; 
And your high priesthood shall make earth 

All hallowed ground.^'' 

And the ministry of these high things, — love, aspiration, 
hope, duty, — shall not these make every place hallowed, 
every hour and day and deed noble, every true scripture 
sacred, every aspiring, righteous life divine ? 



MODERN SAINTS. 



We are accustomed to associate with the word " saint 
some idea of special, pecuHar virtue or goodness. But yet 
there is no necessary relation between sainthood and good- 
ness, in our modern sense of that word. When Paul wrote a 
letter to any one of the ancient churches, he addressed the 
entire membership of that church, without any regard to 
their moral character or standing, as saints. He spoke of 
the saints in Corinth, the saints at Ephesus, the saints in 
Rome ; and at the same time, in the course of his letter, he 
points out fault after fault, both in character and in method, 
complaining that they did not do what they ought to do and 
that they had done that which they ought not to do. So 
that Paul had no conception of any perfect or ideal goodness 
as connected with his use of the word " saint." He used 
this word strictly in accordance with its original meaning 
and idea. Originally, a saint is not a person who is good or 
bad intrinsically; but one who is consecrated, set apart, 
for the service of some deity. Any man, then, who is 
consecrated to the service of a god, is entitled, in the 
language of that religion, to the name of saint ; for even 
material things, implements in the service of the altar, may 
be thus set apart, consecrated, sainted, in the strictest use 
of that term. Whether, then, a saint shall be good or bad, 
according to our modern use of language, will depend very 
largely upon the ideal which he has of the god whom he 



ModcrjL Saints. 



135 



worships ; for it is a natural law that we are, year by year, 
progressively conformed to the likeness of our dominant 
ideal. That which we think of most, that which we admire, 
that which we learn to reverence and love, has such a power 
over thought and sentiment and life that it gradually moulds 
us into its own likeness. Even one of those insensate 
implements of service to which I have referred becomes so 
surrounded by the sentiment of worship, although its in- 
trinsic character cannot be changed, that the qualities of 
the god to whom it is dedicated, the peculiar associations 
that surround the worship, are called up, whenever it is seen 
or spoken of. And the priest or the man, in whatever 
capacity he devotes himself to the service of any particular 
ideal of the Divine, will of necessity take on, ultimately, its 
character. He may, of course, claim to be dedicated to 
God, he may pretend to worship, he may go through the 
.outward ceremonial or form, and yet all the time be 
secretly in his heart caring chiefly for something else. 
In that case, he will not be conformed to the ideal of the 
God that he outwardly worships ; but he will be conformed 
to the ideal of that which he secretly prefers; so that the 
integrity of the principle remains. 

To give you an illustration of the working of this idea, and 
to show you how justly this word " saint " may be used in 
very many different senses, and to show what a power there 
lies in real worship to transform the individual character, I 
wish to refer to several specimens of sainthood from some 
of the different religions of the past. This as preliminary 
to the discussion of sainthood in the modern world. 

Before we step outside of the Bible, where we have begun 
with the usage of Paul, let us take him who, perhaps, is the 
dominant ideal, hero, saint of the Old Testament, who 
has been looked upon as the peculiar type of the coming 



136 



TJie Religions Life. 



eternal king, the Messiah who was to rule over the nations. 
I refer to King David. Of course, it is only just for me to 
add that we are not to hold the Jews, in the later part of 
their career, responsible for a blind admiration of all the 
qualities and characteristics which really made up the man 
David ; because they progressively idealized him, as the 
time went on. They wrought him over into the likeness 
of what they thought he ought to be. And, as they became 
more intelligent and attained to higher moral ideals, they 
made over, unconsciously, in their minds the actual David 
into quite another kind of man. 

What was this actual David, this man after Jehovah's own 
heart } He was cruel ; he was barbarous ; he was blood- 
thirsty; he let no robbery nor wrong, not even murder 
itself, stand in the way of the accomplishment of any 
chosen purpose. And, so far from having resigned all 
these rougher characteristics during his later years, as he 
lay, a worn-out old man, on his death-bed, almost the very 
last injunction that fell from his feeble lips was a command 
to his son Solomon, a solemn, sacred command, — to be sure 
and see to it that an enemy of his, who had done him 
wrong, should not go down with his gray hairs to his grave 
in peace. This was the last word, almost, of King David : 
See to it that you punish relentlessly this man who, years 
ago, did me wrong. Do not let him die in his bed. This is 
the actual David of Israeli tish history. And yet David was 
repeatedly called a saint ; and he was, properly enough, 
termed a man after Jehovah's own heart. 

All this finds simple and natural explanation, when 
we inquire into the ideal, the conception, of Jehovah held 
by the people of David's time. Jehovah was then the God 
of hosts, simply the national God of Israel, a man of war, 
the one who, David himself says, taught his hands to war 



Modern Saiitts. 



137 



and his fingers to fight, the one who sat high in the heavens 
and laughed at the machinations of his enemies, foreseeing 
with joy the time when he should bring them to destruction, 
dashing them to pieces like a potter's vessel. This was the 
ideal of the God that David worshipped. And, by as much 
as David was a saint, consecrated to an ideal and conception 
like this, by so much is it perfectly natural that he should 
take on these qualities and characteristics. 

Let us pass now from this God of Israel to look at one or 
two specimens of saints in ancient Hindostan. The old 
ideal of a perfect life among the Hindus divided it into 
four separate stages. I need not detain you with outlining 
the first three ; but every orthodox Hindu, if he lived to be 
an old man, was expected at the last to surrender his prop- 
erty, make himself penniless, leave his home, and go into the 
forest and become a mendicant hermit, spending the last 
years of his life in meditation, and trying to become absorbed 
in his thought of Brahm ; so fitting himself to leave this 
world by gradually detaching himself from all the bonds that 
held him to any of his human associations. When he 
reached this stage, having resigned the world and placed it 
under his feet, loving nothing, fearing nothing, hoping noth- 
ing, caring for nothing earthly, he was supposed to have be- 
come an ideal saint. And he had; for the God that the 
Hindu worshipped was the Brahm who slept eternally in 
the heavens, without hope or fear or care or sensation of 
any kind, — never moved by pain, never thrilled by a de- 
sire, rarely roused to effort. He who conformed himself to 
the likeness of such a god became so by taking on, so far as 
possible, the characteristics of this Hindu ideal of deity. 

The Buddhists took one step ahead of this even. They 
reasoned, and it seems to me logical. If this is the highest 
ideal of life, why, then, postpone it till you are old ? Why 



138 



The Religious Life. 



not separate yourself entirely from the world while you are 
young, devoting your whole life to God, and not simply a 
fragment of it at the end ? And so the ideal saint of Buddha 
became a man who devoted himself to mendicancy and to 
meditation, from the outset. He eschewed all the delights of 
love, all the sweetness of home, all the joys of childhood, 
and took no part in any attempt at the regeneration of the 
world. He had no interest in political life ; he made no at- 
tempt to reorganize society, and bring it into accord with any 
higher thought or better purpose. He forsook his fellow- 
men and the world, and tried, so far as possible, to live 
utterly detached from all human interests. All this was per- 
fectly consistent with the Buddhist ideal. It was a part of 
the creed of all Hindus that men had lived many lives be- 
fore this, and, unless in some way they could escape it, they 
were doomed to live many lives after this. They were 
wearied out with this perpetual birth and perpetual death that 
bound them to a sort of Ixion's wheel, that now lifted them 
into the light of life, and now plunged them into the shadow 
of death, as the wheel revolved. They were doomed to be 
perpetually born, to live, to suffer and die. And so the 
Buddhist ideal of sainthood, the grand purpose of the Buddh- 
ist life, became an attempt to escape from this fatality in 
which, somehow, they had become enmeshed. In the light 
of this conception, it is perfectly natural that a Buddhist 
saint should have become just the kind of character that he 
was. Some of them carried it so far that, if you were to 
have wandered through some of those jungles of India, in 
those ancient times, you would have found men who had for 
many long, long years never washed their faces or hands, or 
combed their hair or trimmed their beard, or done anything 
except what was necessary to keep life in the body, and who 
sat absorbed in contemplation of the Infinite, attempting 



Modern Saints. 



139 



thus to escape from the burdens and sorrows and cares of 
life. That is, one of those typical Hindu saints by as much 
as he became a saint became thoroughly worthless, so far as 
any human purpose is concerned. Yet, according to their 
conception of the divine and of human destiny, that was 
natural and logical. 

One of the Hindu deities is Siva, the god of death and 
destruction, worshipped with cruel rites. Is it strange that, 
under the influences of a religion like that, there should 
spring up a religious sect like the Thugs, whose very 
religious service was ingenious and systematic murder ? 
They worshipped the god of destruction and death ; and 
they naturally became conformed to his character, and con- 
sidered it the ver}^ essence of their religion to imitate their 
deity. 

What kind of saints would they be, who sincerely wor- 
shipped and became conformed to the character of the 
Phoenician goddess Ashera or the Babylonian Mylitta or the 
Grecian Aphrodite or the Roman Venus, or who became 
moulded into the likeness of Bacchus, the god of drunken- 
ness and revelry ? And yet these had priests and priest- 
esses, whose religious duty it was to imitate these qualities 
and characteristics. They did not regard these things as 
selfish indulgences. They were religious services, naturally 
so, when you take into account the characteristics of their 
deities. 

We shall find other types of worship in the ancient world, 
if we search for them. One of the most important of 
ancient worships was that of the founder of a city or a 
tribe, as, in Rome, the worship of ^neas or Romulus ; or 
reverence for the character of a man like Curtius, who 
was fabled to have plunged on horseback into the chasm 
that opened in the forum, thus threatening destruction to 



I40 



The Religious Life. 



the Roman State. The worship of an ideal like this made 
men patriotic and devoted, consecrated to the service of 
their country. 

Let us pass, now, and look at the typical saints of the 
early Christian world, and see how they became modified, as 
the ideal of God became modified, in the course of human 
development. 

Christianity was not something entirely new in the ancient 
world. Rather was it like a river, larger than any that had 
preceded it, because it was made up of the confluence of a 
hundred other streams. The ancient world paid tribute to 
this new form of religion that came to be called Christianity. 
It had elements in it from ancient Babylon, from Egypt, 
from Greece, from Rome, from the barbarian world. These 
were permeated through and through by the peculiar char- 
acteristics of the life and teachings of the Nazarene. And, 
when we see the inclusive character of early Christianity, 
we may expect to find different types of sainthood, just as we 
do. Jesus, for example, taught asceticism. He taught the 
forsaking of even father and mother and wife and child, for 
the sake of the kingdom. Very naturally, then, in those old 
times, these precepts came to be misinterpreted and mis- 
understood. So we have Saint Anthony fleeing, like the 
old saints of Hindustan, from wife and child and father and 
mother and friend, and living in the desert, and refusing to 
see mother or sister, even when they came in search of him. 
For Jesus had taught, along with this kind of self-sacrifice, 
that, though marriage was honorable in all, celibacy had 
about it some peculiar goodness that the ordinary life had 
not. So, with this, had grown up the ideal of perpetual 
celibacy, and a feeling that it was better to be apart from 
all human associations, and to live this lone life of con- 
templation and aspiration after the divine. So we have, 



Modern Saints. 



141' 



here again, just as in ancient India, as the typical saint 
one who, by as much as he becomes a saint, becomes 
•unhuman, unfit for the service of this world. 

Jesus again taught the glory of self-sacrifice ; and, as 
Jesus taught it, it was all glorious, — self-sacrifice when 
necessary for a principle, for truth, for the sake of man. 
It was very easy at that time to misinterpret that doctrine, 
and make self-sacrifice a gl-orious thing simply for its own 
sake. And so we have Simeon Stylites standing upon 
a pillar year after year, utterly useless to the world, with no 
development of himself except, perhaps, in self-esteem, as he 
came to find how he was regarded as a saint, divorced from 
human life, rendering no service to any one. 

On the other hand, Jesus also taught that it was good 
to labor for our fellow-men. And so we naturally have 
a class of Christian saints like Saint Christopher, a man 
who frankly said that he did not know how to pray or 
to worship ; but, being a giant in strength, he could place 
himself by the banks of the rushing river that flowed across 
the path of pilgrims on their way to Rome and the Holy 
Land, and bear them over on his brawny shoulders, sainting 
himself thus to a life of simple service for his fellow-men. 

Jesus, again, taught charity ; and so we have one of the 
most beautiful legends of the ancient world in the story 
of the life and consecration to the service of the poor of 
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, of whom it is told that, when, 
in defiance of her princely husband's express commands, 
she was going out with her robe full of bread for the hungry 
at her castle gate, she met this husband, and he demanded 
to see what she was carrying; and when she, trembling, 
looking only for rebuke, opened her robe, nothing was to be 
seen but a mass of flowers, God thus working a miracle to 
defend one of his saints, devoted to this beautiful service 
of charity toward the poor. 



142 



The Religion:^ Life. 



We have, then, these different ideals of sainthood in the 
Christian world, all of them determined by precisely the 
same principle operative in the ancient world, — by the differ- 
ent ideals of the divine character, and of the service God 
was supposed to ask of his human children. 

Now, I wish you to note one or two points before I come 
to the consideration of some of the saints of the modern 
world. If any one was a saint in any one special religion, 
by virtue of that fact he could not be a saint in any other 
religion ; for sainthood means consecration to a special god 
who is worshipped by him who is thus consecrated. And 
the differences of the religions of the world spring out of the 
difference of men's conceptions of God and of what they 
suppose he wishes them to do. If I worship one conception 
of God, by as much as I worship faithfully, moulding my 
character into the likeness of this ideal, by just so much am 
I necessarily antagonizing some other conception of God. 
The adherents of this other faith will look upon me as an 
outcast ; while the adherents of the faith I follow may give 
me a name among the consecrated ones. You will see also 
how, necessarily, this practice of the exclusive worship of 
some one conception of God moulds one into the character 
of that God. 

Just consider for a moment. We sometimes wonder, I 
suppose, as we survey the field of ancient history, that men 
could ever think that they were doing God service in follow- 
ing such careers as they laid out for themselves : that Saint 
Simeon could have supposed God cared to have him stand 
for years upon a pillar; that Saint Anthony could have 
dreamed that he was serving God by denying himself wife 
or family or friends, perhaps letting them fight single-handed 
and uncared for in the midst of the great, lonely world. 
What were these men thinking about ? It is perfectly nat- 



Modern Saints. 



143 



urai, perfectly logical. They believed that God was some- 
thing distinct and separate from this human life of ours, 
separate from and outside of the world. They believed that 
he was the dominant power of the universe, the Almighty 
God ; that he held their happiness, their very lives, for this 
world and for all future time, in his hands ; that all things 
they could desire depended simply upon his arbitrary will. 

Suppose you believed that to-day, — believed it with your 
whole soul, — that God was a power separate from your sense 
of duty, your family, and your fellow-men ; that he had com- 
manded you to leave husband, wife, father, and friend, and 
to go away from society and live in a wilderness alone ; that 
he had told you, if you did not do this, you would suffer un- 
speakable tortures, the result of his displeasure, through all 
eternity. Face an alternative like that, and how many men 
are brave enough to meet the issue ? 

Then they believed, also, that all of their fellow-men ought 
to do the same, and, if they did not, it was on account of 
their wickedness, and that they justly deserved the wrath 
that would come upon them. It was not any lack of natural 
affection that made the old Calvinist believe that he could 
actually look over the battlements of heaven, and see wife 
and child writhing in the tortures of hell, and say that it 
was just and right. It was not lack of natural affection and 
tenderness, but because he had come to believe so thoroughly 
in the right of God to do as he pleased. He had identified 
his life so completely with the thought of God that the will 
of God was the measure of right, and he could not do any 
wrong. He had absorbed all these ideas ; and this made all 
these little transitory things of a few years on earth as noth- 
ing, when looked at in the light of the eternal. This is 
what it means ; and, when we look over this ancient world, 
we shall find that the gods in the main were so separate 



144 



The Religious Life. 



from the ordinary life of man that they took very little inter- 
est in it. And, in many cases, they were even regarded as 
hostile to human happiness, jealous of human prosperity. 
One of the most striking features in the tragedies of the old 
Greek writers is this jealousy creeping out everywhere. If 
a man was a little prosperous or a little happy, his neigh- 
bors expected to see him lightning-smitten by the wrath of 
Jove. This is the meaning which lies at the heart of that 
marvellous legend of Prometheus, the grand old Titan, who 
was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, with an eagle 
gnawing at his liver. Why? For no reason but that he 
had rendered a service to mankind. By this, he had made 
himself an enemy of Zeus. It is this idea also, which lies at 
the heart of the Eden myth. Elohim is represented as being 
angry because the man and the woman had eaten of the 
tree of knowledge ; and he thrust them out as a punishment. 

But, as the world went on, as Jesus taught his more hu- 
mane religion, and as the result of modern study and sci- 
ence, we have come to have an entirely different conception 
of the divine, and of the relation of God to human life. Right 
there lies the secret of the change of our conception of ideal 
human character. You remember Jesus, for the first time 
in the history of the world's religious teachers, placed the 
love of God and of man on an equality. The first command- 
ment, he says, is, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy soul ; and the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself." Jesus taught that, though men 
brought their sacrifices to the temple, they could not offer 
them acceptably so long as they were out of right relations 
to their fellow-men. Jesus taught that a man might not even 
know that he was serving God until he found at last that he 
had been serving him in the noblest way in the world. You 
remember the famous judgment scene, v/here those v/ho 



Modern Saints. 



145 



stand on the right hand are commended, and they reply, 
modestly, that they did not know that they had done these 
things for him, and Jesus answers, Inasmuch as you did it 
to the least of these my friends, you did it unto me. He 
made the service of man identical with divine service ; 
serving man, the way to the service of God. 

It was a thought like this that Theodore Parker had in 
mind when at the atheist's funeral he said, " O God, though 
this man did not know thee by name, yet he kept thy lawP 

And like this also was the thought of Charles Sumner 
when he was asked about the two commandments, of love 
to God and love to man. He said he did not know that he 
understood much about the first commandment, but he tried 
to keep the second. 

Now, then, we are prepared for this modern conception of 
sainthood. Where is God to-day ? What are his laws ? 
What shall a man do to find God and obey his laws ? If a. 
man discover truth in any direction, in the farthest star or 
in the lowest mine, what is he doing ? He is simply setting^ 
his footsteps over again in the footsteps of God. If a man. 
renders some service to his fellow-men politically, helping 
on a higher ideal, framing better laws, what is he doing ? 
He is only finding within the realm of human society the 
laws of God as illustrated in the relationship between man 
and man. So, here again, he is on consecrated ground. If 
a man devote himself to art in some high and noble way, 
what is he doing ? Only discerning, loving, worshipping, 
picturing a fragment of the divine beauty. If a man become 
a philanthropist, — if a genuine and devoted man, — caring 
most of all to promote human happiness and to contribute 
something toward making this life a little brighter for his 
fellows ; what is he doing ? Since the laws of happiness are 
the laws of life and the laws of God, and since he who is 



146 



The Religious Life. 



happy is perfectly adjusted to God's laws, he again is follow- 
ing in the footsteps of God ; trying to catch, by listening, 
the pure strains of eternal music, and sing them in the ears 
and for the joy of man. 

And so, in any department of life, he who finds the truth, 
he who devotes himself to his fellow-men, is thereby conse- 
crated in the noblest and truest way to God. Mark you, I 
have not changed my definition as to sainthood one whit. 
Sainthood is ever consecration to God. But he who has the 
truest, noblest, loftiest, deepest conception of God, and con- 
forms himself to this ideal, becomes, in the very noblest 
sense of that word, a saint. And I dare to say here, before 
giving two or three instances, that, though we look upon 
these men as engaged in the secular affairs of the world, 
there are not in the entire course of Biblical history, from 
beginning to end, one half-dozen men who have sainthood in 
the truest conception of that word, so that they are worthy 
to stand beside the army of saints that I can show you in 
our modern, even our American world. 

Let me give you two or three specific illustrations. Let 
us take a life like that of Charles Darwin. He was born in 
good society and endowed with an independent fortune and 
finely educated. When he stands on the threshold of his 
life, what is before him ? A kind of life is before him which 
is followed by a great majority of those born and endowed 
as he was, — a life of ease, of social refinement, of culture, 
of dilettanteism, of self-indulgence, of selfish pleasure. Any 
of these was open to him. What kind of a life did he 
choose ? From the very outset, he devoted himself mod- 
estly, simply, entirely, with no pretentious claims, to the 
study of truth, scientific truth, seeking out and striving to set 
his feet in the footsteps of God. Reverently, humbly, he 
followed out this plan his life through ; and when, at last, as 



Modern Saints. 



147 



the result of it, he gave the world a discovery second to none 
in the history of thought, it was met, as such discoveries gen- 
erally are at first, with vituperation and abuse and a bitter 
flinging of words. What, then, did he do ? He met them 
all with gentleness, seeming by his spirit to illustrate those 
words of Jesus, and to find the excuse for it in human igno- 
rance, — " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they 
do." Still making no pretentious claims, he pointed out the 
weakest spots in his own system, putting weapons into the 
hands of his enemies to destroy him and his works, if they 
were able, living in charity and kindness, treating all men 
gently, until he was received up out of sight. I dare to say 
that, in all the records of the world's saints in the past, there 
is no more saintly character, according to the truest defini- 
tion of that word, than was his. 

I may say substantially the same thing of Herbert Spen- 
cer ; and of that great Frenchman, Littre, who devoted him- 
self, in the midst of misunderstanding and petty social per- 
secution, to the noblest, highest ends, and who, when well 
advanced in life, instead of sitting down to take his ease, 
laid out a plan of work which he persistently followed for 
twenty years, working much of the time eighteen hours a 
day. And, when he had completed this great monument of 
human devotion, he gave the remainder of his life to the 
service, in every way possible, of his fellow-men. These 
saints of literature, these saints of science, these saints of 
philosophy,^ — I seem to see them studding the firmament of 
human achievement like stars ; and yet I have not time to 
even speak their names. 

Turn to another department of human thought, and see 
another type of saint. I said that a man who devoted him- 
self unselfishly to attempting to work out the divine ideal 
of human society thereby consecrates himself, in the truest 



148 



The Religious Life. 



and most literal sense, to God. Look at a life like that of 
Charles Sumner. Born in the highest social circle, endowed 
with an independent fortune, he gives himself in his young 
manhood to a cause that was socially outcast, that was 
looked upon by all respectable men in Massachusetts with 
contempt. But he follows it unfalteringly to the end. He 
even becomes a martyr to his devotion. There is one side 
of the character of Sumner, illustrating this point, that few, 
perhaps, have known about. After the brutal assault in the 
Senate, he was obliged to go away for rest and medical treat- 
ment, under the care of Dr. Brown-Sequard. Dr. Brown- 
Sequard has put it on record that, while Sumner was abroad, 
conscious of the fact that he was being abused here at home 
and accused of staying away from his post of duty merely 
to enjoy himself and pass the time pleasantly, he was utterly 
unable to carry on a consecutive line of thought or even to 
keep up a consecutive conversation. Under these circum- 
stances, he submitted to such surgical operations as very few 
have undergone. Dr. Brown-Sequard says that never in the 
whole course of his life did he submit any man or animal 
to such terrible tortures as Sumner endured, and endured vol- 
untarily. For, when the doctor asked him if he would be 
etherized, he replied that he would not, if it would interfere 
with the success of the operation or the rapidity of his re- 
covery. When told that he would recover more rapidly 
without it, five separate times he went through this torture. 
His life was devoted to the noblest ideal of human service, — 
to the political welfare of his fellow-men, to the enfranchise- 
ment of a race ordinarily looked upon as having no rights 
that any man was bound to respect. 

Beside him stands that other modern saint, who has per- 
haps no equal in the ancient world, — another well-educated, 
socially high young man, consecrated from the beginning to 



Moderii Saints. 



149 



the end to the service of humanity. I need hardly say 
I refer to Wendell Phillips. Besides these, how many 
another life is eminent, — stars of guidance for our modern 
political life ! 

I can just hint at another type of saint, represented by 
men like Wilberforce and John Howard, and women like 
Florence Nightingale and Octavia Hill, devoting her life to 
lifting up out of the slums of London the lowest of the 
poor ; and a hundred in our own American history, worthy 
to stand beside these. 

Then there is the other type of saint, one of the most 
conspicuous representatives of which is Mr. Theodore 
Parker. A religious saint, consecrated to new religious 
advance, he gave himself in his young life to contumely and 
scorn, to bitterness and sorrow, that he might stand for the 
vision of his soul, for the highest conception of God that he 
believed had been born into the heart of man in these older 
ages of the world. 

Not only this, but our modern life is full of saints who 
are not, perhaps, members of any Church ; for a man may 
be a saint in his store, in his bank, in his office, on the 
street, in his home. Any man who, according to the light 
that he has and the opportunity that Is given him, conse- 
crates himself to doing honestly and truly the best he 
can for the welfare of his fellow-men is thereby consecrated 
to God. How many are there in our homes, how many 
unrecognized, living obscure lives, who make darkened 
pathways seem a little lighter, who take by the hand and 
hold up and guide the steps of those ready to fall, who 
bring courage and cheer to fainting, despairing hearts, who 
are sunshine and help and comfort to those whose lives 
would be lonely and troubled without their aid ! These 
saints make bright the rough path that we are walking, and 



The Religious Life, 



are worthy, by and by, to shine as a sun set in the firmament 
of universal recognition and praise. 

We have not, then, changed the definition. A saint is 
still one dedicated to God. We have changed our concep- 
tion of God. He has come down out of the sky, without 
leaving it ; for he is still in the most distant star. But he is 
here by our side. He is working for the uplifting of society. 
His are the bloody tracks on the world's battle-fields, where 
are fought out the great conflicts of right and wrong ; his 
the rays of light that give us the later, higher intelligence 
concerning the great problems of the world ; his the devo- 
tion, the fidelity, that, in the lives of statesmen, help to 
reorganize humanity ; his the torch that guides the feet 
of the scientific explorer; his the dream of beauty that 
moves and thrills the soul of the artist ; his is all that is 
true, that is beautiful, that is good in human life. If we 
seek for sainthood, let us find the opportunity for it in our 
common lives, wherever we are placed. 

Here is the field for sainthood, here 

Where is the hottest of the strife. 
Stand not aloof, but enter in 

And help men seize the prize of life. 

Seek truth and noble deeds and peace ; 

From wrong and sorrow set earth free ! 
And, doing this, thou'lt hear the voice, — 

" E'en so ye did it unto me ! " 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. 



Let me begin by attempting to outline for you what I 
suppose to be the essential meaning of the Church in 
holding and teaching this great doctrine. By as much as it 
has called itself " the Church,''^ it is intended to represent its 
communion as universal, inclusive of all truth, of all beauty, 
of all goodness, of all that is divine, and exclusive of all that 
is outside of or antagonistic to the divine. This doctrine, 
then, of the communion of saints asserts and emphasizes, 
from the church stand-point, the organic unity, the oneness 
of all those in heaven and on earth, in the present, in the 
past, and in the future, who have, do now, or shall in any 
coming time become partakers of this divine life. This is 
figured forth clearly in that parable of Jesus, wherein he 
speaks of himself as the vine, and the people, his disciples 
and followers, as the branches. The branch lives not an 
independent life. It lives by virtue of the fact that it has 
organic, vital connection with the vine, drinks its life ; and, 
if cut off from it, it must perforce wither and cease to be. 

Suppose a gardener should go into his garden some spring 
day, after the roses were in bloom, and should cut off one 
branch from the parent bush. It might contain buds just 
opening, half-blown roses, full of beauty and promise; and 
he might set it out by itself in the. earth. For a time, it 
would seem to be alive and to possess all the beauty and 



152 



The Religions Life. 



characteristics of the parent bush ; but the gardener knows 
that the end of it all will be withering and death. It is cut 
off from the source of its life, and it must end in decay. 
So the Church would assert that, since the Church is this 
true vine, with Christ for the root, and all individuals are 
only branches, stems, twigs, buds, flowers, in this ; and in 
this alone can any individual find the divine life. So 
long as each is thus vitally connected with the source of all 
good, of all truth, of all beauty, so long it finds its life in this 
communion of saints. It enters into and partakes of this 
common bond, which is the source of all its good. 

Now, then, you can easily see that, from the church stand- 
point, accepting this definition, it would logically hold that 
this one Church, this one communion of saints, was the source 
of all good ; that the individual lives only as he enters into 
communion with it ; that from it he receives all life and power 
and beauty and peace ; and that to it, in turn, he owes all 
duty, all devotion, all service. In the light of this truth, you 
get the Catholic stand-point from which to view the enormity 
of the position taken by the heretic. If it be true that this 
is the Church of God and the source of all life, the reservoir 
of all truth and beauty and goodness, then he who creates 
a schism within this perfect body of the Church of God, 
or turns a traitor to it, has committed the gravest of all 
conceivable crimes ; for he has not only committed suicide 
by detaching himself, cutting himself off from the only 
source of life, but he has struck a blow at the common life 
and commion hope of humanity. And so, granting this 
premise as true, you see not only the logic, but the justice, 
of the punishment which the Church has always meted out 
to the heretic in this world, and threatened him with in the 
world to come. It is not only logical but just that Dante, 
following the church tradition and representing correctly the 



The Communion of Saints. 



153 



church spirit, distinguishes Judas and Satan, the traitors and 
arch enemies of the faith, with this bad superiority over all 
the possible wickedness of all other beings in all worlds. 
And, when Dante has created his hell, down deep in the 
inverted apex, in the lowest, worst spot of the Inferno, he 
has placed Judas and Satan side by side. 

Coupled with that doctrine, — I know not whether the 
Church would acknowledge any genetic and logical connec- 
tion ; but coupled with it in thought — is another belief of 
the Church, that of a fund of stored-up merit, the result 
of works of supererogation. The saints are supposed to be 
saved on account of the merits of Jesus Christ ; but, beyond 
this and beyond anything necessary on their part simply to 
secure salvation, they have, by their patience, by their devo- 
tion, by their labors, by their self-denials and sufferings here, 
laid up a great fund of merit, which is at the disposal of the 
wisdom and the benevolence of the Church, to be set over 
against the debit account of those who have fallen and who 
are in need. So any one, who enters into this great com- 
munion of saints, enters upon, if he ever needs it, an 
inheritance of such a share of this great fund of stored-up 
merit as is necessary to make his account right with God. 
This is the doctrine in brief, in bald outline, of the com- 
munion of saints as held by the Church. 

Out of this doctrine have sprung misconception, cruelty^ 
division, persecution in the history of the race. And yet I 
believe that here the Church has always been reaching out 
after one of the most magnificent of truths. The error has 
been in assuming that only those that it had chosen to 
accept as members of its communion, or only those who 
chose voluntarily to come into membership in this com- 
munion of the saints, had a right to be classed as members 
of the household of God. 



154 



The Religious Life. 



But we hold, in the Ught of our last discourse, in which I 
outlined the characteristics of sainthood, a broader concep- 
tion of this Church of God, this communion of the saints, 
in all nations and all ages. You will remember that last 
Sunday we made the broad statement that any man, who 
devoted himself in any direction to the search for truth, 
to the search for the beautiful and the good ; who was 
faithful in even the lowest departments of life ; who was 
trying to add something to the common fund of the world's 
goodness and progress ; who ministered, in however feeble 
or poor a way, to those things which tend to lift and lead on 
mankind to some better future, — that these, by as much as 
they were consecrated, sainted, devoted to these labors, had 
a right to the name of saints, and were already consecrated 
to God ; for God includes all beauty, all goodness, all truth, 
all things that lift up and lead on. And so, if we define 
anew our doctrine of the universal, the Catholic Church of 
God, of the communion of saints, in the light of this 
principle, we shall include in it all men, all women, all 
children, from all ages, in all races, under every sky, called 
by whatever religious name, calling God by whatever name 
in their worship, — all who devote themselves to this com- 
mon, better life of the race. These are the Church of God. 
These constitute the great communion of saints. 

And is it not true, when we have come to this new defini- 
tion, that we can make, on behalf of this communion, the 
very identical claims which the Church has always made on 
its own behalf ? Here is all the truth, all the beauty, all the 
goodness, all the divineness of human life, in this communion 
of the saints. From this comes all of good that any individ- 
ual life ever receives. We live by virtue of the fact that we 
are grafted into this one central vine. To this, we owe all 
devotion, all duty, all service. To it, we owe all that we have 



The Communion of Saints. 



155 



received. It is our duty to swell the common tide of the 
world's life and the world's progress as it sweeps out into the 
future. And he who, through pride, through vain glory, 
through self-conceit, through selfishness in any form, cuts 
himself oif from or antagonizes this common life, this com- 
munion of the saints, not only commits suicide, so far as 
his own highest and best life is concerned, but becomes 
a traitor to all that is divine and human in the world. 

This doctrine, then, transformed thus in the light of a 
broader and deeper definition, comes back to us in a more 
vital form. It is just this common life of humanity to which 
the individual owes so much. By as much as we are linked 
in with this common life have we received all that is of 
value. We owe to it our endeavor, our devotion, our 
service. It is this which I wish to illustrate and to empha- 
size to your thought, and to bring home to your feeling as 
a weight on your conscience. 

Let us see how natural, how true, how profound is this 
principle, by a few illustrations. I will begin by asking you 
to look at a life like that of Thoreau. 

Thoreau, you will remember, for a time revolted against 
society and all its claims. He resented the external press- 
ure of the great mass of mankind. He wished to be free, 
to stand alone, to walk his own way and think his own 
thoughts. He resented the claims which society made upon 
him. He denied the right even to tax him for the common 
good. Now, I shall not deny that a protest like this is 
occasionally a sign of health and sanity ; that we need now 
and then to go a little apart from our fellows, to assert our- 
selves, to stand as much as may be alone, to resist the press- 
ure of the majority, to think our own thoughts and feel our 
own feelings, and go our own ways, just so far as it is possi- 
ble. But here is an important point : let us see how far it 



156 



The Religious Life. 



is possible, how far it is sane, how far it is a sign of Ufe. 
Let us see how far Thoreau himself, who was a good typical 
example of such an attempt, was able to go. 

Thoreau went to Concord and built himself a hut near 
Walden Pond, and became a hermit in the midst of nine- 
teenth century civilization. How much of what made that 
life of Thoreau's possible was his own? How much did 
he owe to the great communion of saints of humanity ? 
Strip from him all that this world, against which he revolted, 
had given him, and what would be left ? You would take the 
hat from his head, the shoes from his feet, the clothes from 
his back. His ability to build the house that sheltered him 
from the weather was the result of ages of experiment and 
inheritance on the part of the race. The tools that he car- 
ried with which to build his hut were the result of the inge- 
nuity, the experiments, the toils of mankind. The very 
brain with which he thought, the very brain that made him 
desirous of getting apart and looking with fresh eyes, if he 
might, at the world, was the result of ages of struggle, of 
toil, of thought, of effort on the part of this same mankind 
from which he wished to escape. And then, curious contra- 
diction, though he had fled from the world and resented its 
interference with the brain that the world had made for 
him : with the paper, the pen, the ink, that were a part of 
the gift of the civilized world, — with these he must per- 
force write books, and why 1 Write them to send them out 
into this world that he had deserted, that they might be read, 
and that there might be reflected back to him, through sym- 
pathy, the author's joy. All these things he owed to the 
world around him ; and, without them, Thoreau would have 
been a naked, wild, uncultivated, rude savage of the woods, 
incapable of counting the fingers of one hand, or forming a 
single letter that made up one of his books, or even of think- 



The Communion of Saints. 



157 



ing of the possibility of the existence of a book. All that 
made him anything above a brute was the gift of the world- 
wide communion of saints. 

Let us take another illustration. Go back to the begin- 
ning, or near the beginning, of this human life of ours on 
the planet, to the time when the separate particles of hu- 
manity began to aggregate into clusters and organisms of 
a higher type. There was a time when the materials that 
make up this solar system were floating diffused and sepa- 
rate and, apparently, independent particles through space. 
At last, they began to collect, to aggregate in clusters, and 
to make up the sun with its family of planets and moons 
about him. 

So there was a time, I suppose, when the individual ele- 
ments of humanity were very largely scattered and sepa- 
rated. At last, they began to aggregate ; and the first and 
simplest aggregation must have been that relation which 
now we recognize under the name of the family, — a man, a 
woman, and a child. These make up the smallest organism 
that we can properly call human. And now note how each 
one of these is dependent upon the rest. The man depends 
upon the woman for all that is best in himself, for the devel- 
opment of all that is noblest and finest and sweetest. And 
she, in her turn, depends on the man for the development 
of the most characteristically human things in her character 
and life. And the child is dependent upon the man and 
the woman for life itself and all things. But, on the other 
hand, the man and the woman depend in their turn upon 
the little helpless child ; for through this relationship, this 
bond of sympathy, have been progressively developed those 
qualities that lift man above the brute, and make him feel 
that he is akin to the divine. 

Then, this process of aggregation went on until families 



158 



TJie Religious Life. 



were grouped and gathered into the tribe or nation. And 
here, again, how dependent, mutually, each upon each in all 
this tribal or national life ! The very first problem that 
the race had to solve was the ability to form a tribe or 
nation compacted together into one organism, and able to 
stand shoulder to shoulder, life to life, in one organic whole. 
The tribe that was first able thus to assert itself would be 
the one that would survive, that could resist the attacks of 
wild beasts or wilder men, or the disintegrating influence 
of nature about them ; that would be able to conquer the 
surrounding races and all those things that interfered with 
its onward progress. When we come to the national life, 
note how little could be done by one individual alone. The 
chief or king would be dependent upon the nobles and the 
people, and the nobles dependent upon the king and the 
people. The warriors would be dependent on the workers, 
and the workers dependent on the warriors ; each a part 
of the one whole, the hand having no right to say to the foot, 
I have no need of you, and the foot having no right to despise 
the hand ; and hand and foot having no right to despise 
the brain, and the brain having no right to despise the 
heart; many members in one body organized and com- 
pacted together by this mutual interdependence. And so 
there arose out of this disorder the germs of this great world- 
wide community life, by which, alone, mankind is able to 
develop and make progress. 

I want to draw a simple and graphic picture of this de- 
pendence of each of us on somebody else in our modern 
life. Let me then enter the dining-room of any one of you 
this mornmg, and sit with you by your breakfast-table, and 
make a few suggestions in regard to your dependence upon 
the workers and the thinkers of all the past, of all the world. 

How does it come to pass that you, gathered around your 



The Commiuiion of Saints. 



159 



well-spread table, are a part of the great nation that fears no 
power in the world, that is at peace with all the earth, that 
represents this universal prosperity of all its members ? All 
the struggles of humanity from the beginning have entered 
into the production of this American nationality and this 
American prosperity and peace. The battle of Marathon 
was fought to make your breakfast-table possible. The 
struggle out of which came the Athenian republic, the 
Roman Empire, the States of the Middle Ages, the freedom 
of the German tribes; the character of Saxon and Briton; 
the conquests of the Conqueror; the Norman element added 
to the great life of England ; the fight of the Barons for lib- 
erty against the despotism of John ; the warfare of Cromwell 
against Charles; the rise of the Puritans; the work of 
Luther ; the freedom that sprang up and came to fruitage in 
the English national life, and was then transplanted to these 
shores ; the warfare of years with the aborigines, the long 
struggle of the Revolution, all the recent phases of our 
American national life, — all these, the entire histor}^ of the 
world, have contributed to lay the foundation of the pros- 
perity, the peace, on which your breakfast-table rested this 
morning ; and you talk about what you have done, and your 
ability to live apart from your fellows, and your independ- 
ence, your thought, your brain, your genius, your power ! 
Then how many an experiment, how many a failure, are 
woven into the carpet that was under your feet and the cloth 
that covered your table ! How much of human genius and 
effort is displayed in the porcelain and china from which 
you ate ! How many mines dug under ground, how much 
ingenuity and inventive skill, went to the construction of 
knife and fork and spoon ! How many laborers in Japan, 
Rio, Java, how many ships whitening the sea, how many 
miles of railroad track, how many thundering trains, brought 



i6o 



The Religious Life. 



to you your tea and coffee ! How many farms furnished the 
butter and cream ! How many patrolmen walked the streets ; 
and what a strong, protective arm of government was held 
above you, that you might sleep in peace and arise with ap- 
petite for this same breakfast ! How many despised, poor, 
outcast laborers have been contributing, while you slept, to 
the health and the sanitary condition of the city ! And, 
then, what human labor created the beautiful patterns on 
your walls and hung the pictures that delight your eyes ! 
What a world of invention and struggle, reaching back to 
and out from the inaccessible past, has laid a picture of the 
jDresent condition of the whole planet for five cents beside 
your plate ! And all this sympathy that makes you care to 
know about the world is the development of the civilized 
heart that makes it possible for you to enter into these 
world-wide relations. How much have you done yourself 
toward all this ? How much do you owe to the world-wide 
communion of the saints, to those men sainted, devoted, con- 
secrated to the development of all this civilization of which 
you are a part, and which brings the water of life to your 
individual lips ? 

And so I might go on and illustrate this truth in regard 
to the different departments of life, business, intellectual, 
social, moral, and religious. How did you come by all 
these ? How is it that you are able to carry on your business 
to-day successfully ? You owe it to the past and to the 
present civilized organization of the world. Suppose you 
wish to cherish a thought, to pursue or utter a train of ideas. 
In the first place, it is this communion of saints which 
has given you the brain by which to think. Then you are 
dependent upon the sympathetic brain development and 
culture in those about you for the ability to utter your 
thought and to get back the responsive echo of the intel- 



The Communion of Saints. i6i 

ligent perception of it on the part of somebody else. If 
you wish to write a book, you are dependent upon the culture 
of the world for readers. It is the intellectual development 
and life of all the past that have created the intellectual 
world in which you live to-day. How do you know that you 
are not living, as men used to think they were, on a little 
flat plain of earth, with a solid dome like a metal cover 
shutting down over you to the horizon, and with a few 
lights, called sun, moon, and stars, a few miles overhead ? 
How do you know these great facts about the universe and 
its immensity ? How do you know that you are riding 
the chariot of earth that is whirled along with lightning-like 
rapidity on its pathway through the blue ? How do you 
know all these magnificent truths ? Why, we have looked 
through the eyes of an Anaxagoras, a Bruno, a Galileo, a 
Kepler, a Newton, a Young, a Darwin, and a Spencer ; and 
to-day the little child, standing on the shoulders of these, is 
able to gain a grander view of the universe than had any of 
these magnificent giants of the intellectual life of the past. 
He who enters into this communion of saints receives the 
benefit of all that has been wrought and achieved, until it 
has become literally true, as Jesus said, that he who is the 
least in this kingdom of heaven is greater than the greatest 
of those who were not thus privileged. 

And so of the social life of men. We are dependent on 
somebody to love us, we are dependent on somebody to love. 
Shut us off alone, and how much would be left of life that we 
would care to keep t 

So, again, in the religious and moral life. It is the expe- 
rience of all the past that we breathe as the very breath of 
our moral and religious life to-day. Entering into it, we are 
able to begin where the world has left off, and go on to 
higher and better attainments still. 



l62 



The Rcligioits Life. 



Now, then, modern science, so far from taking away this 
grand doctrine of communion of saints, teaches it to us in 
the law of evolution by an accumulation of facts that the 
world never conceived before. We do not bear the root, as 
the apostle says, the root bears us. We are simply a branch, 
a twig, a bud, of the common life of the world, and all that 
is of value in us individually we derive from this communion 
that we hold in this common life. We have been developed 
by it ; and this conviction of the common life of the race 
bears us up, and thrills our veins with this life. 

It is, then, the one dream of the world to realize in its per- 
fection this communion of the saints. It is the grandest 
problem of the modern world, — this ability to organize, and 
so relate to each other the rich and the poor, the ignorant and 
the learned, the capitalist and the laborer, that they shall 
enter into not only, but receive, their just share of this com- 
mon life of the world. He will be the grandest saint, in the 
future estimation of men, who shall be able to solve this 
great problem. It is the one thing that faces us and that 
threatens the nineteenth century civilization more than any 
other danger ; and, if we fully realize how vital a thing it is, 
— this common life of humanity, — we shall see that we 
cannot safely neglect it. 

Consider, for instance, our life here in Boston. No matter 
where you live, whether on the finest avenue, the most beau- 
tiful hill-top, the noblest street in the city, if the city's health 
in the lowest slums is not regarded, then you are not safe. 
No matter how fine and sweet the morality which you see 
budding and blossoming in the life of the loved ones around 
your fireside, unless the morals in the slums of the city are 
regarded, neither your son nor your daughter is safe. It is 
a common life. We are on board one ship. Whether you 
are in the cabin or forecastle, if the ship goes down, we all 



The Communion of Saints. 



163 



founder together. The nobility of the age of France pre- 
ceding the Revolution thought that they could live their gay, 
butterfly, self-indulgent life in happy Olympian scorn of the 
common conditions of the common people of France. But 
when the earthquake came, and the ground trembled be- 
neath them, and the pent-up lava burst forth, they found that 
the desolation swept all the superstructure away. It is our 
business to see to it that we develop in its entirety and com- 
"pleteness not only the upper structure, but the lower, in this 
common human life of ours. 

There is no grander dream possible to any human soul, it 
seems to me, in the way of personal achievement, than that 
which George Eliot has so grandly expressed in that brief 
fragment which is so familiar, but which, as the world goes 
on, I take it, will be more familiar still. Here was the 
aspiration of her soul : — 

"Oh, may I join the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence : live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end with self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues. So to live is heaven : 
To make undying music in the world, 
Breathing as beauteous order, that controls 
With growing sway the growing life of man. 

. . . This is life to come, 
Which martyred men have made more glorious 
For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
That purest heaven; be to other souls 
The cup of strength in some great agony ; 
Enkindle generous ardor ; feed pure love ; 
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty ; 



164 



The Religions Life. 



Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
And in diffusion evermore intense. 
So shall I join the choir invisible, 
Whose music is the gladness of the world." 

Here is the noblest human aspiration, here the highest 
human duty. How any one can fail to be thrilled with the 
thought of it, as he looks back, passes my comprehension. 
I am overwhelmed and awed as I sometimes gain even a 
little glimpse of my personal debt to the noble ones — nay, 
the thousands — who have struggled and lived and suffered 
and died to make my present life possible. As illustrating 
this concretely, I met Mr. John Weiss on the street one day, 
soon after I came to Boston to live, and he said to me in 
that humorous, pathetic way of his, " Mr. Savage, you ought 
to be grateful to me and some of the rest of us who have 
been killed to make it possible for you to do your work with 
freedom and peace." And I am grateful ; for, indeed, he 
spoke the literal truth. He and a thousand true souls like 
him have died for the liberty that we rejoice in here this 
morning, — died by the year, though they dragged out a 
physical existence ; died as truly as the Crucified One. 

As we then are grateful to these men, to this communion 
of the saints, from whence we draw every breath and the 
blood of our life, let us feel the responsibility and duty 
that urge us to contribute our devotion and service to this 
common life. 

But I believe this communion of saints is larger than 
George Eliot pictures it. She confined it to this world. 
Her immortality was the immortality of a life perpetual only 
in the onward move of the race here beneath the skies. I 
believe rather, with Paul, that this life here is but an arena 
where we run our race for the crown. We struggle, we 
smite, we strive after the victory ; but all around us, invisible 



The Commimioii of Saints. 



165 



at present to our eyes, is a great cloud of witnesses, tier 
above tier ranging off into the invisible. And I love to 
think this morning that George Eliot herself to-day sits in 
one of these higher tiers among the grandest of the immor- 
tals. And, as I strain my ear to listen, I seem sometimes to 
catch the faint echo of a cheer, as some grand blow for truth 
or right is struck here on earth; some whisper of inspira- 
tion or courage, as we face some new foe ; and I feel some 
thrill of that common life which binds together past, present, 
future, earth and heaven, the one true church of God, the 
Catholic Church, the world-wide communion of saints. 



CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS CHANGES. 



In this series of sermons on which I have been engaged^ 
I have made it apparent to you that I firmly believe religion 
is a permanent factor of human nature and human life, 
I think it is not likely to decline in the world, much less to 
die out or pass away. But, at the same time, I have made 
it apparent that the forms that religion at any one time 
assumes are subject to perpetual change. The heart, the 
soul, the essence of religion, is the endeavor of man to 
become rightly related to the universe outside of him, 
rightly related to his fellow-men. That is, an ideal life is 
the end and aim of religion. But the ceremonies that may 
be attached to religious services, the dogmatic beliefs in 
which men embody their religious ideas, all these externals 
of religion, the methods by which men may endeavor to 
carry out that which is the one object of all religious think- 
ing and living, — these necessarily change as man changes 
and develops from age to age. It is my purpose, this 
morning, to consider some of the principles underlying 
these religious changes, and to note some of the more im- 
portant of those that are taking place in the world at the 
present time, to which we, in our measure, are contributing, 
and of which we, of necessity, are a part. 

We are apt to overlook these changes or not to note the 
significance of them, for the very simple and sufficient 
reason that we are in the midst of them. You learned a 



Contemporary Religious CJianges. 167 



similar lesson during the war, when it used to be a common 
saying that, if one wished to know what was going on at the 
front, one must come to New York or Boston, The soldiers 
in the army knew less about it than we who were at home. 
They were a part of those movements, in the midst of 
them, and consequently unable to estimate their drift or 
tendency as clearly as those who stood away from the pas- 
sion of battle, looking at it from afar. So it has always 
seemed difficult for people at any particular age of the 
world to estimate correctly the great changes that were 
going on about them. Thus it is that another generation, 
separated from the passions of the conflict, can overlook the 
field, and see what was being done and what was the neces- 
sary and natural outcome. These changes, then, must 
always be going on, unless man ceases to advance ; for they 
inhere in the very fact that this is an infinite universe, and 
that the human race is finite and is in process of develop- 
ment, — changing in thought, changing in feeling, changing 
in institutions, — going through intellectual, political, and 
moral changes age after age. 

This necessity for change is connected with another fact 
of close kin with that which I have just mentioned, — a fact 
which is frequently spoken of as a discouraging one for 
man, a fact that is supposed very largely to vitiate all his 
attempts to understand and explain the great problems of 
the world. Goethe said, Man never knows how anthropo- 
morphic he is. And this word " anthropomorphism " has 
played a great part in the thought and discussions of the 
religious world during the last generation ; and, as I have 
just said, is supposed to indicate some terrible, mighty fact 
which is able to make of very little worth our attempts to 
understand the world. What is anthropomorphism ? Why, 
it means simply that man is compelled, as he studies this 



The Religious Life. 



infinite universe, to think of it in terms derived from his 
own being, from his own experience. He is compelled to 
think of it as a man, and must therefore think of it inac- 
curately, so they tell us. 

To illustrate what I mean clearly : I came across a state- , 
ment during the past week, concerning an old satirical work 
written some years ago, that described a convention once 
held among the humble-bees, the purpose of it being to 
come to some better conclusion as to the nature of the 
universe and its purpose. And it goes on to say that they 
looked at it from necessity from their stand-point as humble- 
bees, and came to the conclusion that the universe was 
formed simply for them, and that they, their nature, their 
destiny, exhausted its possibilities. Why not? I propose 
this morning to defend the humble-bees, and all people, 
whatever their nature or degree, who look at the universe 
from the stand-point of their own nature. How else should 
they think of it, how else should they look at it ? What 
difference does it make to the humble-bee what kind of a 
universe man lives in ? What concerns him is whether 
the universe of the bee is suitable for him. That is the 
important truth and the only important truth for him. 

You remember that short satire or satirical poem of 
Browning's in which Caliban, half-beast, half-human, waking 
up in an underground cave, comes to study the universe from 
his stand-point. The moral is that the universe is quite 
other than what Caliban thinks it. He measures it from his 
stand-point. But why should he not 1 So far as his welfare 
is concerned, he is right. It concerns him to know what the 
universe is to Caliban. It does not concern him to know 
what it is to any other creature. So why should not man be 
anthropomorphic ? I look at the universe through my eyes : 
they are the only eyes I have. How else should I look at it 



Contemporary Religions Changes, 169 

If I am to estimate whether a substance is hard or soft, I 
must do it through my sense of touch : that is the only way 
I have for knowing anything about it. It does not concern 
me to know whether this desk might be hard or soft in 
some other planet, or to some other race of beings, so long 
as it is hard to me. What, then, is the use of telling me that 
some other creature might live, like the fabled salamander, 
in the fire, so long as fire is hot and ice is cold to my touch ? 
What I want to know is what is the universe to me ; and that 
which is the truth to me is the truth that supremely concerns 
me. I am perfectly well aware that my capacities, my fac- 
ulties and senses, are not the measure of the universe ; that, 
if I were suddenly endowed with a sixth sense, I might have 
a new world about me in an instant. But I am not endowed 
with a sixth sense at present : consequently, I must take the 
world as it is to my thought and to my five senses. It is 
this which concerns me; and it is a real universe to me, con- 
stituted as I am. And it is nothing to me that it may be 
something else to some other being, in some other world, 
constituted in some other way. Because the human race is 
anthropomorphic, therefore it follows naturally and of neces- 
sity that man must picture the Infinite in terms derived from 
his own nature and experience. And, therefore, as his 
nature develops, as he makes intellectual advance, as he 
makes political advance, he must of necessity change his 
conception of the universe. And you will find that nearly 
all the great changes that have been brought about may be 
easily grouped under these three great divisions, — intellect- 
ual, political, and ethical ; for man, as he has stood con- 
templating the greatness of the world about him, has many 
and many a time been deceived like the traveller in the Alps 
when he has seen his own figure projected like a spectre 
against the clouds, and has not waked up perhaps for a long 



i;o 



The Religiotts Life. 



time to the conception of the truth that it really is only his 
own shadow. 

So man has projected, shadowed, against the Infinite his 
own political, intellectual, ethical ideas, and has named these 
the divine, has made them the constituent elements of his 
religious doctrines, his religious thoughts. It is perfectly 
natural that this should be so ; and it is right that he should 
have done so, only he should have been wise enough — and 
he is at last becoming wise enough — to know that this is all 
only provisional ; good enough for to-day, perhaps the best 
possible for to-day, but that it will be antiquated and left 
behind as he becomes wiser, as he is able to think more 
broadly and deeply and to feel more nobly. 

I do not see how it could have been otherwise than it is. 
How is it possible for a man to transcend himself ? Those 
who tell us that we ought not to be anthropomorphic, that 
we ought to get rid of all this delusion, that the Infinite is 
not made in our likeness, that we ought not to use terms 
derived from our own experience when talking about the 
Infinite, it seems to me, are not overwise. They tell me that 
I must not talk about God as thinking, because thinking is 
derived from a process going on in my brain, and God has 
not any brain. I know that very well ; but what shall I say t 
I know that there is a process going on in the Infinite that 
is not less than thinking. If it is different from thinking, it 
is higher than that ; but thinking is the highest term that I 
am capable of using for it. They tell me that I have no 
right to talk about God as feeling, about God as loving, 
about God as a father, about God as a governor, about God 
as just, as forgiving, because they say that these are terms 
derived from man and his experience, and they cannot ade- 
quately measure the Infinite. I know it as well as they do ; 
but, if I am to speak at all, I must speak as a man, and I 



Contemporary Religious Changes. 171 

must use terms derived from hum^an nature and experience, 
or else I must be forever silent. I must, however, remem- 
ber the justice there is in the criticism that these are terms 
that fall unspeakably short of the reality. But they are the 
best shadows I can use for setting forth so much of that 
reality as to-day is possible for me. I cannot think of any- 
thing higher along the intellectual line than that. I cannot 
think of anything higher than goodness. I cannot think of 
anything better than love ; and so I use these terms tempo- 
rarily, believing that they mean as much as at present we 
can express, but knowing that the reality transcends them on 
every side, and is infinitely beyond the power of expression. 

These changes, then, are going on according as man is 
able to think more wisely, according as he is able to frame 
his conception of government more wisely, according as his 
moral nature develops and he comes to feel more justly, 
more tenderly, and to be more true. 

I wish, now, to indicate in this brief way some of the 
principles underlying these changes, showing the necessity 
for them, and to note some few of the important ones that 
are taking place at the present time. We shall thus be able 
to see, in some dim way at least, the drift of the religious 
life of the modern world. 

The first thing that seems to me very marked, as we look 
over the religious world of the last fifty years, is to find how 
the dogmatic side of religion is declining, coming to be 
considered of less and less importance. When I became a 
member of the church, I was obliged to stand up in the 
presence of the congregation and listen to a very long and 
detailed creed, a third of which I did not comprehend then 
and do not now, and give my assent to it, as a condition of 
church membership. Every one who has noticed the 
changes that are going on is aware that large numbers 



1/2 



The Religions Life. 



of orthodox churches to-day make no such demand. They 
do not ask assent to a long creed. Sometimes, if they are 
intimately acquainted with a person's character and believe 
that the person is a good man or woman, they will not 
trouble about the creed at all. They only ask him to come 
in with them on the broad basis of this principle of moral 
fellowship, and to do what he can to make the world 
brighter and happier and better. The reason of this change 
is because we do not feel so certain as we used to as to what 
is perfectly true. We are not so wise as we were, for the 
simple reason that we are a great deal wiser. 

Let me indicate a little more definitely some of these 
changes, that you may see how real and natural this fact is. 

It was very easy for primitive man to v/orship a fetich, or 
to worship the spirit of his dead ancestors. He felt that 
religion was quite a definite and comprehensible thing, and 
that he knew all about it. But, when this little personal god 
disappeared in the god of the tribe, of the city, then this 
conception of what his god and of what religion was became 
less certain at each step. In the first place, each man had 
a little family god of his own. This god took care of his 
own household, and it was very easy to find out just what 
this god wanted. But, when he became the god of a tribe 
and of a nation, a greater number of elements was involved, 
and his own individuality was in danger of being lost. And 
when, at last, this god became not only the deity of his own 
tribe, but the God of the whole earth, then man began to 
think how little a part of the attention of this God he 
could expect to have personally ; and he bowed in the dust 
before him, and began to speak of him as the Infinite, the 
Incomprehensible, the One whose thoughts were as high 
above him as the heavens were above the earth. 

Even during the Middle Ages, God and the universe had 



Contemporary Religious Changes. 



173 



not grown so much but that man might reasonably expect 
to have definite and clear ideas concerning them. Until 
within two or three hundred years, this whole universe was 
no larger than the orbit of the moon. There was only one 
inhabited earth, and that was a little flat plain ; and the sun 
and the moon and the stars were made for this. Men knew 
perfectly well what God created the earth and man for. 
There had been rebellion in heaven ; and a third of the 
angels had been cast out, leaving a great vacancy. So God 
decided to create this universe, this little world, and to 
create man and place him on it, that he might be disciplined 
and fitted to fill up the blank that had been made about 
God's throne. They knew when God made man, and 
just what his thoughts were, and just what God wanted 
man to do, and just how they must regulate their lives, their 
thoughts and beliefs, in order that they might become as 
the angels. 

But, suddenly, this little universe that we could clasp, at 
least, with the arms of our thought, has extended, the firma- 
ment has become thin air and melted away into the blue ; 
and in the place of one little earth, with one little race of 
beings on it, we are lost in thinking how many worlds there 
may be and how many races may inhabit them, what differ- 
ent natures they may have from ours, how different their 
origin, their destiny, the purpose of it all. We have waked 
up to find ourselves lost in the midst of a universe to which 
we cannot even conceive a limit. We' know unspeakably 
more than our fathers did; but, just because we know so 
much more, we feel that we know very little. Our sense of 
the certainty of our knowledge has slipped away from us, till 
we feel that we are not so sure about things as we used to be. 

The way this universe has grown upon us may be figured 
in this way. Suppose a child brought in his infancy into 



174 



The Religious Life, 



one room, and told that this room was the world. He lives 
there, grows up in it, and knows nothing else. Year after 
year he studies it, its furniture, its books, its make-up, until 
he thinks he knows and comprehends the universe. But 
some day he finds a key, and, wondering what this key is 
for, searches for a use, till he finds a lock, and, inserting it, 
thrusts back the bolts, and the door flies open, and he finds 
himself in another world. His universe has enlarged. He 
does not know the world quite so thoroughly as he did, but 
yet he knows more than he did before he opened the door. 
In this room, he finds another key and another door, and 
so room after room, range after range, till he sinks down 
wearied with the sense of being overwhelmed and lost in the 
thought, I know nothing at all, — I, who thought I knev/ 
everything. 

In this way, the knowledge of the universe has grown. 
Our intellectual conceptions of it have broadened ; but we 
feel less dogmatic certainty about this particular thing or 
that, — not because we do not know so much as we did, but 
because we know so much more. 

The next step that we need to take, and the next great 
change that has been going on in the modern world, is the 
natural and necessary result of the above. There has been 
growing a broader spirit of toleration for religious differ- 
ences. When a man feels perfectly certain that he knows 
the whole of what God wants him to do, he has less patience 
with a man who differs from him. He knows he is right ; he 
knows that the other man is wrong. But when he wakes up 
at last, with a sense of humility, to the consciousness that, 
perhaps, he is not altogether right, that he may not know 
everything, then he is ready to entertain, at least, a possibil- 
ity of the other man's holding a part of the truth that may 
have escaped himself. So there grows up a sense of tolera- 
tion toward those who differ from him. 



Contemporary Religions Changes. 175 

We do not now feel toward other religious denominations 
as they felt toward each other fifty years ago. I used to 
have a pamphlet, written by a Congregationalist, in which it 
was proved with perfect logic that there was no chance for 
a Methodist's being right. The system of Methodism was 
denounced as bitterly as now a man in an orthodox church 
would denounce the most outright infidelity. You know, 
too, how our forefathers in Boston treated the Baptists and 
Quakers. It was only a few years ago, during the days of 
Dr. Channing, that a man was imprisoned for expressing a 
doubt as to the existence of God. These indicate a few of 
the changes that have been going on in this matter of tolera- 
tion toward those who differ from us in religious ideas. 

Not only that, but it is only a few years since that Chris- 
tendom held that any one outside of Christendom was hope- 
lessly doomed. When I was a little boy, I used to attend 
the "missionary concerts," as they were called, and hear 
earnest prayers and appeals for contributions in behalf of 
foreign missions, on the ground that the heathen were going 
down, by thousands and millions, to endless perdition. 
To-day, we know that even the highest orthodox authorities 
do not talk of Christianity as the one absolute finality in 
religion, and of all other religions as perfectly false. The 
London Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 
has published some of the finest treatises that I know of 
concerning Buddhism, Confucianism, the religion of Moham- 
med, and the other great ethnic religions of the world. And 
the Canon of Westminster Abbey, one of the ablest scholars 
of England, has published a noble book about Marcus Aure- 
lius, Epictetus, and Seneca, under the title Seekers after 
God. We have become, then, more tolerant of these dif- 
ferences, whether they be differences between our denomina- 
tions or churches, or those larger religious differences that 



1/6 



TJie Religious Life, 



separate the great religious names of the world. This has 
come about very largely because of the fact that we have 
learned so much more about this universe than we used to 
know, that we have become a great deal more modest than 
we used to be. 

Suppose a man had been born, and lived all his life, in a 
little cottage on the southern slope or just at the foot of 
Mount Washington ; that he had never gone away a mile 
from his home. Suppose that, some day, an artist should 
pass by, and should show him a picture of Mount Washing- 
ton, and the man should say on looking at it : " That is not 
Mount Washington at all. I have lived here all my life, and 
I know." But the artist asks : " Have you ever been to 
a point twenty miles north of the mountain ? This picture 
was taken from there." Then, perhaps, after a while, 
after he thinks about it and turns it over in his mind, the 
man may wake up to the fact that there may be just as 
many different pictures of Mount Washington as there are 
different points of view. So we are waking up to the fact 
that there may be just as many true partial pictures of the 
universe, of God, of the religious life, as there are possible 
points of view in the universe, from which to take these 
pictures. Therefore, we are becoming tolerant of these 
divergences. There is no doubt that every religion, every 
denomination, every little sect that lives and continues 
to live, does it by virtue of the fact that it holds, somewhere, 
a bit, a fragment, however small, of the truth. Men do not 
live on lies. They live on that which feeds them ; and that 
which feeds one man, in one stage of his development, may 
not be at all that which is good for another. I believe that 
the lowest and crudest forms of the religious life had their 
value — nay, their necessity — in the condition of human 
nature at that time. The only danger about them is in 



Contemporary Religious Changes, 177 



fixing them and making them permanent, not recognizing 
the possibility of larger, deeper, broader growth. 

Then there is another reason. The ethical side of the 
religious life has been advancing ; and men have begun to 
feel that all creeds, all thinking, all speculations, all 
science, all philosophy, are of value only as they culminate 
in moral character, in what we call goodness. Goodness 
is the supreme thing. It is the end toward which the world 
is moving ; and intellectual ideas and views are of value 
only as they help on this development of goodness. Men 
are coming to value this more and more ; and they are 
coming to the discovery that men of all sorts of opinions, 
and men who say that they have no opinions at all, still may 
be good men, humane, loving, kind, tender, true in their 
business relations, true as neighbors, as friends, true in their 
homes, true to their duties of citizenship. And they say, if 
these men reach these results, then it cannot be that the 
speculative ideas to which we hold are so vitally important 
after all. If the fruit ripens on the tree, that is the chief 
thing ; and any method of cultivation must be a measurably 
good one that permits the culture and development of 
luscious fruit. 

There is another change which helps on this spirit of 
toleration, — the development of the idea that each indi- 
vidual is responsible for himself alone in the presence 
of God. I have had occasion before to show you that, in 
the early development of government, there was the sense 
of a corporate responsibility. I have pointed out to you 
the fact that, when David committed what was regarded as 
a sin, the people were punished. Seventy thousand souls 
were slain by the angel of Jehovah on account of his sin. 
During the persecution in Spain, when the Jews and Moors 
were driven out, the reason was not so much personal 



i;8 



TJie Religious Life. 



hatred toward the Jew or Moor as it was the belief that God 
held Spain responsible for the opinions of the Jews, and 
the king did not dare to harbor heresy, lest calamity should 
come on his whole people. This idea was of universal preva- 
lence in the early world and until the last few centuries ; 
and this lies at the foundation of nearly all the old persecu- 
tions. When a man knew that his neighbor held heretical 
opinions, he did not dare to keep still, lest his own family 
should be held guilty before God. We have, then, in the 
modern world, gained the belief that the individual alone is 
responsible for his own ideas, for his own opinions ; that 
each man has a right to choose his own destiny ; and that 
he, and he alone, must answer for it before God. 

Another great movement, illustrative of the point I spoke 
of a moment ago, shows how governmental ideas of the 
world could be reflected in the heavens and represent the 
method by which God cares for the people of earth. There 
has come to pass, at the present time, democracy in govern- 
ment. The rights of man have come to the front ; and the 
rights of the ruler have been put into the background. 
The king's will used to be the measure of all justice, of 
all law. It was a maxim that the king could do no wrong. 
Whatever he decided was right, and the ultimate from 
which there was no appeal ; and the people accepted this. 
But we are developing more and more the idea that the 
people are the source of all power ; that the ruler is not 
their master, but their servant ; that he is simply the expres- 
sion of their collective will. Along with this has come a 
transformation in the religious ideas of the world. The old 
theology is permeated through and through with govern- 
mental conceptions derived from these despotic ideas. 
God's will was ultimate. He had the right to do whatever 
he pleased. Men were created for his glory. If he chose 



Conteinpo7'ary Religioits Changes. 179 



to create man and send him to perdition, to illustrate his 
power and justice, he had a perfect right to do so. If he 
chose to create another man, and take him to heaven 
as an illustration of his forgiveness and mercy and grace, he 
had a perfect right to do so. Humanity, as Paul said, was 
clay in the hands of the potter ; and the clay had no right 
to ask any questions, no right to rebel against anything the 
potter might choose to do. All this was a reflection in the 
heavens of ancient political ideas. The sultan, the king, was 
absolute despot; and God was such a sultan or king. 

We are beginning to feel more and more that the welfare 
of man is supreme. We dare to say God has no right to do 
wrong, God has no right to create useless suffering, God 
has no right to bring into the world a sentient being, unless 
he sees to it that the outcome of that life is good and 
blessed. There is no goodness off in heaven that is not 
goodness down here. 

So these various ideas, derived from human nature, have 
come to the front in the modern world, and are supreme ; 
and they are working changes so far-reaching in theolog}' 
and religion that it is possible for me to indicate only a few 
in outline. But I wish to touch two or three points, showing- 
how certain things, that used to be regarded as essential 
in religion, are being taken away, only to come back again 
grander than ever. I do not wonder that the world is dis- 
turbed, perplexed, as to whether it has lost its religion or 
not, when it has lost those things which used to be thought 
the great primal, eternal essentials of religion. 

As illustrating what I mean, let us glance at this book 
called the Bible. We have lost the Bible as the infallible 
word of God. This has come about through the develop- 
ment of the intellectual, the political, and the ethical ideas 
of the world, the principles that I have just said underlie all 



I So 



TJie Religious Life. 



these changes. We have lost the Bible as the infallible 
word of God. We have found that it is full of errors ; we 
have found that it teaches undeveloped morality, that it is 
partial, that it is not adequate to the growing life of the 
world. But, while we have lost it as the infallible word of 
God, it is coming back to us by and by. It is coming very 
rapidly. It is coming back to us as a book that we shall 
love to put our arms around, and hold close to our hearts 
with a tenderness and devotion we never felt before. It is 
coming back as a human book. We are no longer to be 
responsible for its mistakes. We are no longer to defend 
that which cannot be defended. It is coming back as the 
religious literature of a great people, full of religious fears, 
aspirations, hopes ; a book profitable for doctrine, for correc- 
tion, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness ; a book 
that we shall read as we would read the history of our child- 
hood, and find out the lines along which the human race has 
developed in its religious life, and the grand hopes that 
have animated it in the past. 

We have lost Jesus. It is true, that which is quoted so 
many times, they have taken away our Lord, and we know 
not where they have laid him. The modern intelligence 
and the higher thought of the world have taken away our 
Jesus as Lord, as Master, as a unique man, as an incarna- 
tion of the divine, as a fact dropped into human history, 
instead of being an outcome of its natural development. 
Jesus has gone forever from the intelligent modern world in 
this conception of him ; but I see him coming back again 
grander, more beautiful than before. The God is going 
away : the brother-man is to come and stay with us. He is 
coming to illustrate the possibility of a true, tender human 
life in the midst of the commonest conditions, a perpetual 
inspiration and example. Jesus comes to us a man like 



Contemporary Religious Changes. i8i 

ourselves, that we can imitate. He illustrates the fact that 
the divine and the human are alike, and that, therefore, the 
human can be filled with the divine. He illustrated it, lived 
it. out amid ordinary conditions of human life. Jesus, then, 
as an exception, as a deity, goes away, to come back as 
brother-man, as counsellor, guide, helper, friend. 

The whole process of the religious development of the 
world has been to take God himself away from us in one 
very important sense. I do not wonder that the religious 
world has stood appalled time and time again. Go to the 
fetich worshipper, and tell him that his fetich is only a 
fetich, and he will feel that he has lost his god. He does 
not know where to find him ; for that was the highest and 
best thing he had at that time, and that is taken away, and 
his god becomes unreal to him in a sense that he was not 
before. Go to Rachel, as she was leaving her father, Laban. 
She has taken her gods with her ; she has hidden them in 
the furniture of her camel, and is sitting upon them. She 
can carry her gods in her hand, and look at them. But tell 
her that they are only images, and she has lost her god. 
So, when Newton and Copernicus came with their new uni- 
verse, and took away the God that sat on his throne just 
above the blue, I do not wonder that the world stood amazed 
for a while, and felt that it had lost its God. So, v/hen 
modern thought tells us that we must not think of God as 
personal in the sense in which we are personal ; that we 
must not talk about his thinking, about his feelings, as 
though he were just a duplicate of ourselves, — I do not 
wonder that the world starts, that its heart beats more 
quickly with fear, and that it wonders if it has really lost its 
God. The whole process in this line of development has 
been a going away on the part of God. He is removed far 
away, until, to-day, we say " infinite " ; and the " infinite " 



l82 



The Religious Life. 



means that we cannot say anything adequate about him^ 
that we cannot cover him with any word, that we cannot 
limit him with any definition, that we cannot think him 
with any thought, that we cannot measure him by the 
grandest flight of our imagination. We stand with Herbert 
Spencer, and say he is the " Unknowable," the one infinite 
Power behind and back of all things, the one that we can- 
not classify ; and, therefore, we put our hands on our mouth, 
and our mouth in the dust, and say he is the Unknown. 
And, yet, in this process of going away, he has been coming 
back again to all who can think correctly and can feel 
rightly. For, this one unknowable, infinite Power which 
thrills in the farthest star is the same God who beats on the 
seashore in the tides, the same God who pulses in the 
human heart, the same God who looks out of the eyes of 
our friends in tenderness and love, the same God who is 
manifest in the beauty of the flower, in the fact of the awak- 
ening life of spring, ready to break through the cold, damp 
earth, and reclothe it with all the beauty and glory of sum- 
mer. God has passed into the Infinite ; but, when we say 
"-infinite," we find that it is the closest thing of which we 
know. The infinite, where is it ? If I could measure and 
comprehend the curve that a dust grain makes as it is blown 
about in the breeze this morning, I would measure for you 
the curve of the infinite. If I could comprehend the tiniest 
blade of grass, I would explain God for you. The Infinite 
which is beyond is right about us. In this Infinite One we 
live and move and have our being. He is the very life of 
our life, the thought of our thought, the love of our love. 
He clothes us about like the atmosphere. He besets us 
behind and before, and lays his hand upon us. Wherever 
we go, we must forever be in his presence, folded about by 
his care, sustained by his power, guarded by his justice, led 
on by his wisdom, and tended by his love. 



THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK. 



On last Sunday morning, we considered some of the more 
important religious changes now going on. The next step 
that naturally follows is a consideration of the tendency of 
these changes and of the question, What is likely to be their 
outcome ? What is to pass away in religion, and what is to 
remain ? 

In order to answer this, we must look for a little at 
the principle underlying these changes. What is the law 
in accordance with which they are taking place ? If we 
can answer this clearly, then we shall be able to throw 
at least some little light upon the other question which we 
have proposed. 

I believe that the one great law of the survival of the 
fittest — the law which underlies the growth of worlds, the 
development of life on this planet in all its forms — is the 
one which we shall find to give us the clew through the laby- 
rinth in which we desire to find our way. It is the law of the 
survival of the fittest, in accordance with which these changes 
go on, as well as all other forms of growth and decay. 
And what is this law of the survival of the fittest ? Since it 
was discovered and verified only a few years ago, it has 
seemed a very simple one. And we, perhaps, wonder that 
it took the world so long to find it out. We may observe 
illustrations of its workings all about us in these spring days, 
if we but watch the processes going on in the squares and 



The Religious Life. 



parks. In any little plot of ground where grasses, weeds, or 
flowers take root and grow, you will see this principle at 
work. After the seeds are planted, what is it that deter- 
mines which ones of them shall continue to exist, to monopo- 
lize the soil, to drink up the life that is in the air, and 
maintain their place while others perish and decay ? It 
is this law of the survival of the fittest which is at work; 
or the force which works according to this law, to put it in 
more accurate phrase. It is not of necessity the ideally best 
that survives. That is not what the law means. It is 
not the most beautiful flower ; it is not the most valu- 
able grass ; it is not the plant which is of the most possible 
service to man. It is not the ideally best from our stand- 
point, but that which is best fitted to the conditions in which 
it is placed. To illustrate what I mean, suppose any one 
of you were fortunate enough to own a little garden of 
your own, and you should sow the seeds, or set out the 
developed forms of different kinds of grasses, flowers, 
shrubs, such as are to be found in every clime, in every 
land, in all parts of the world. You would find that some 
of them would flourish, and that some of them would die. 
What would this mean ? It would mean that certain of 
them are adapted to this climate and to the particular soil 
in which you have placed them, and to the air from which 
they derive a large part of their sustenance. Those which 
are thus adapted, which are fitted to live in this climate, in 
your garden plot, — these are the ones that will live ; and 
the others will die. It is in accordance with this principle 
that we find the edelweiss growing just under the edge 
of the glacier in the Alps ; that we find the pine in Maine 
and in Norway, the palmetto in the Carolinas, the olive in 
Italy and Spain, the sensitive plant, where I have seen 
it growing in luxuriance, on the Isthmus of Panama, among 



The Religiotts Outlook. 



i8s 



the rich flora developed near the equator. It is under 
the working of this law that the distribution of plants has 
taken place all over the world, till each has found its 
appropriate home, a place where it can survive and grow. 

And what is true in this department of life is true every- 
where. It is just as true of governments, of systems of 
philosophy, of scientific theories, of religious institutions, 
as it is of the grasses, the trees, the flowers. It is not 
necessarily the best form of government that survives in 
Italy or Spain, for example. That form of government 
takes root and maintains itself in either one of those 
countries which is best adapted to the nature, the intel- 
ligence, the moral character, and the general characteristics 
of the people. That is what the law of the survival of the 
fittest means. No people can maintain for any length 
of time a better form of government than that which is 
representative of its average characteristics. Precisely the 
same is true of a philosophical theory. That philosophical 
theory may not be the one which will take root and grow at 
any particular stage of the world's advancement, which is 
ideally the best and truest, which is nearest to the actual 
nature of things. The philosophical theory will flourish that 
is best adapted to the intellectual stage of the people who 
hold it. You cannot have a highly intelligent theory — one 
that demands and receives verification on the part of the 
people — held by those who are intellectually undeveloped, 
who are not scientific, who are not accustomed to ask for 
proof, and who know nothing of the methods of verification. 
Because any great national religion thrives and grows, 
it is no proof that it is true ideally, or that it is to spread 
and become permanent over all the world. It indicates 
simply the fact that this particular phase of the religious 
life is, for the time, adapted to the stage of growth, or the 
intellectual life of the people that hold it. ■ 



The Religions Life. 



Now, with this principle in mind, let us go on and ask the 
question as to what form of religion, what essentials of the 
religious life, are likely to become permanent as humanity 
advances. It used to be held that Christianity was the 
only true, divine, and therefore perfect religion, and that it 
was destined by and by to supersede all other religions and 
rule over the whole earth. It was believed that all the 
other religions of the world originated with the evil one ; 
that they were developed by his inspiration, through the 
dishonest machinations of conscious impostors, and foisted 
thus upon people, in order to stand in the way of their 
reception of the true religion. One of the most famous of 
the Jesuit missionaries of the world, when he went to China 
a great many years ago, and first came face to face with 
Buddhism, sent word to the authorities that he represented 
that the devil had been there before him and had copied 
Christianity so accurately in its main essentials, its doctrines, 
and rites, that it was almost impossible for him to get 
a hearing for the true religion. This indicates the way in 
which the other religions of the world have been regarded 
until within modern times. But we are come to a time when 
this type of thought is passing away. We believe that all 
the religions of the world are honest efforts on the part of 
men groping in the darkness to find the secret of life in the 
knowledge of and obedience to God. It seems to me, in 
this great contest among the national religions of the world 
for supremacy, that the probability is that no one of them is 
to win. I believe that each one of them is more likely to 
develop along the lines of national progress of its own race, 
gradually eliminating its errors, leaving behind its crudities, 
its moral incompleteness, its superstitions ; and thus, along 
these converging lines of advance, the whole human race is 
to progress toward some common outcome. For, as the 



The Religious Outlook. 



187 



world becomes more intelligent, as it demands substantially 
the same standards of truth in matters of belief, as it 
demands substantially the same ethical ideas and con- 
ceptions of right and wrong, do you not see that by 
necessity there is to come a common sentiment of religion 
and life ? Humanity is essentially one ; and, as it grows 
intelligently and morally, this common consciousness will 
be developed more and more. So much, then, in regard 
to the development of the great national religions of the 
world. 

We are to narrow somewhat our range of investigation 
this morning, and discuss simply those forms of religion, 
or such systems as are offered as substitutes for religion, 
within the limits of our own Christendom, and find out 
which ones of these are most likely to survive and become 
permanent in the world. In order to do this, we must take 
account of the direction in which man himself has developed. 
What characteristics of human thought, human feeling, 
human life, are developing, as the world becomes more and 
more civilized? Which of these characteristics are likely to 
become permanent ? That is, we are inquiring what is the 
nature of the soil and atmosphere of human nature in which 
religious institutions must root themselves and grow, if they 
are to survive at all. We are attempting to find out the 
different environments to which any institution that is to 
survive must adapt itself, and so prove that it is the fittest. 
This is a necessary preliminary to the answer of our ques- 
tion. In raising this question, we must remember that we 
are to judge by the highest and noblest specimens of the 
race with which we are acquainted. 

If you go back two or three hundred years, you will find 
that certain ideas, which were held then by a very few, are 
to-day the common property of the race, and that those 



The Religious Life. 



ideas which were held by the masses are very largely out- 
grown and left behind. That means that the world has 
made progress; and that, if we wish to find out the type 
of thought that is likely to predominate in one or two hun- 
dred years from now, we must look toward the highest and 
best specimens of the race to-day, because that which is 
the best thought and the noblest feeling of the present time, 
if the world really does make progress, will become the com- 
mon property of the masses by and by. In other words, 
humanity is like an army on the march. Where the van- 
guard is to-day, if the whole army continues to march and 
move forward, the main body will be to-morrow or next 
week ; and the rear-guard, and even the stragglers them- 
selves, will by and by come up to the position occupied by 
those that to-day lead us. So, if we wish to find out what is 
to be the common type of life and thought in the future, we 
must find out what is the best type of thought and life 
to-day. 

Which way, then, is humanity moving ? What character- 
istics or peculiarities of our human nature are growing to 
more and more, and are likely to dominate and control the 
future development of the race ? 

I. Intelligence. Brain power is developing more rapidly 
than ever before in the history of the world. It is only 
within a few years that books have become the common 
property of the race, within the reach of the poorest and 
the lowest. I was reading in a review, only this last week, 
the opinion of one of the leading novelists of England in 
regard to the numbers who would be readers in a hundred 
years from now; and he says, what you will probably ac- 
knowledge as true, that, whereas a popular writer has now 
an audience of thousands, within a hundred years he will 
have an audience of millions. The great masses of the 



The Religious Outlook. 



people are gradually, but very rapidly as compared with the 
rate of progress which has characterized the past, coming 
up to this level in their interest in literature and the literary 
expression of the life and hopes of man. 

Intelligence, then, is coming to the front ; and along with 
this is coming what we are learning to recognize as the 
scientific method of investigating truth. The scientific 
method is nothing more nor less than organized common 
sense. It simply asks people, before they shall believe a 
thing to be true, to be careful about observing their facts, 
then to be careful to verify these observations, and, only 
after they have done this, to formulate their theories for 
general belief. It means the application of common sense 
to questions of truth or falsehood. That is all there is to 
the scientific method. This, then, is going to rule in the 
future. And here is the application of this point : only those 
beliefs in the field of religion which can bear the application 
of this method are likely to survive. Everything is to be 
tested in the light of the clearest and freest intelligence of 
man. 

2. The world is growing freer all the time. Go back far 
enough, and you will find that such a thing as individual 
liberty was as a fact unheard of, as an idea almost unthought 
of. The individual was nothing : the family, the tribe, was 
all. Individual responsibility was neither defended nor 
permitted. Such a thing as individual research in matters 
of religion was looked upon not as a duty, as we look upon 
it to-day, but as a crime. Despotism in politics, even 
aristocracy in politics, is virtually becoming a thing of the 
past. Just as fast and as far as the world advances, these 
democratic ideas of government, in literature, in religion, in 
life everywhere, are coming to supersede the old. The 
individual is coming to be more and more in regard to 



190 



The Religions Life, 



these great matters. Instead of being led by a few leaders 
here and there, or driven in a mass like a flock of sheep, 
men are coming to demand that the law to which they shall 
submit themselves as right shall be a law that appeals 
to them personally, to their intelligence, their conscience ; 
and they are coming to refuse to submit to any power in 
heaven or on earth that simply presents itself as a power, 
and that does not appeal to their common sense and to their 
moral instincts. That is another great change that is going 
on, and that is to continue in the future. 

3. The gradual uplifting of the moral level of the world to 
a higher standard, a nobler ideal of duty, a more general 
recognition of the law of right as being the very law of life, 
the law that binds men not only by right, but that appeals 
to reason and self-interest, as the one to which they ought 
to submit themselves. This is going on until, to-day, a 
thousand things that were recognized as right a hundred 
years ago are now clearly seen as wrong ; and this process 
is to go on more rapidly in the future. And whatever 
appeals to men, whether under the guise of government or 
science or art or philosophy or religion, must be able to be 
measured and proved by this ever-growing moral sentiment 
of the world. To-day, nations themselves are no longer free 
in this matter. They are amenable to this unwritten, un- 
spoken law ; and they are perpetually being brought before 
its bar, tried, and sentenced or acquitted in accordance 
with their approximation to it or departure from it. 

4. There is another characteristic of the race. There has 
developed, along with this sense of individual right and 
freedom, a more general, broader, grander hope for man as 
man. Go back only a few ages in the past, and you find 
that general government, everything, was ruled entirely by 
the opinions and thought of the few, — one here and one there. 



The Religions Outlook. 



191 



The great mass of the people, their rights, their hopes, were 
utterly ignored. There was no general hope for the world. 
Athenian citizenship itself was confined to only a few. The 
great mass of those who lived in Athens had no powers and 
rights which anybody respected ; while all the outside world 
were barbarians. And what was true in government was 
true also in religion. There were an elect few chosen out 
of the great mass ; and these elect few were favorites of the 
gods, and all the rest were ignored. They had no hopes, 
no rights, no outlook for the future. But there is coming 
a development of sentiment in this matter, — a feeling that 
there shall be a common hope and a common destiny for 
the race, the lowest as well as the highest, whether it 
is to be in the dust or in heaven. There is coming a 
demand, on the part of the best thinkers, that the whole 
race shall be included in some common destiny. This is the 
direction in which the world is growing ; and as man grows 
wiser, as he grows better, as he grows more hopeful, more 
sympathetic, these principles will become more and more 
dominant. 

Now let us, in the light of these principles, bring before 
the bar of our investigation a few of the great religious t}^pes 
of the world, and see whether they can endure the examina- 
tion. My time will only permit me to do this rapidly, and 
not in the way of an exhaustive discussion. 

Let us take that which has claimed to be Christianity par 
excellence for the last fifteen hundred years, the great Roman 
Catholic Church. Has it a chance for survival in the future 
as it is to-day t It seems to me that most clearly it has not. 
It has manifestly been declining for the last hundred years 
among the most intelligent and better part of mankind. 
And, if you test it by these principles which I have just 
been illustrating, you will find that in almost every particu- 



192 



The Religious Life. 



lar it fails to meet the demand. In the first place, a large 
part of its dogmas cannot justify themselves before the bar 
of human intelligence. Test them by the scientific method 
of investigation and verification, and some of them are 
proved untrue, and many of them are shown to be incapable 
of substantiation. 

Test the Catholic Church again by this criticism of the 
better humanity that is coming, the growing freedom, the 
development of the individual and of the race. The Catholic 
Church in its origin, in its whole structure as it pertains to 
this world and the next, is a hard and fast despotism. How 
can a church organized in that way survive in the presence 
of a world that is ever developing more and more individual 
liberty ? 

Then, again, test it by the moral standard, and a large 
part of its doctrines have sprung out of and are consistent 
with a lower stage of moral development than that which the 
best part of the world occupies to-day; and, as the world 
elevates the standard of its morality, the gulf will become 
ever wider and wider. A large part of the dogmas of the 
Catholic Church are not only inconsistent with modern 
liberty and freedom, but they are immoral, distinctly and 
definitely. Test it again by the last standard, the growing 
universal hope of man. Its outlook is a narrow one, — bliss 
for the few, destruction for the many. Test it, then, in the 
light of all these principles which are becoming more promi- 
nent in the better part of the world, and it fails to meet the 
demand. 

Let us next look at the principles of the orthodox Protes- 
tant world. I group them all together, because, in so far as 
the churches are orthodox, they agree doctrinally in the 
main, not only with themselves, but, with a few exceptions, 
they also agree with the doctrines of the Catholic Church. 



The Religious Outlook. 



193 



And precisely the same points that I have made against the 
claims of the Romish Church for perpetuity will hold equally, 
only in a lesser degree, as against any form of orthodox 
Protestantism. The intelligence of the world is gradually 
rejecting all these dogmas. While it has not one pope that 
claims absolute domination over the mind and heart and 
the conduct of all the world, every sect and denomination 
has a little pope of its own, who claims almost as exclusive 
a jurisdiction over his own sect as does the Romish pope 
over the Catholic Church. 

Then, again, many of these dogmas are repugnant to the 
noblest morality of the world, and must, as the world grows 
better, be rejected and left behind. The secret of many of 
the changes going on in the Churches about us is the revolt 
of the human heart, the revolt of the better moral sense of 
the world. It says, These things are bad, or they would be 
bad here on earth and among men ; and we cannot intelli- 
gently believe that what is mean and partial and evil and^ 
hateful here can be just the opposite in heaven. Against, 
these doctrines also holds this other objection that I have 
indicated, the fact of this narrow outlook for the hope of 
humanity. 

Now, then, let us turn from this and glance for a moment 
at that form of thought which in many directions is claiming 
to be a substitute for religion. I shall group in my discus- 
sion two or three phases of thought which are really distinct 
in some particulars, because they agree in the main, and 
because I have not time for more particular discussion. 
There are those who call themselves secularists, those who 
call themselves materialists, many who call themselves ag- 
nostics. They differ in many important particulars, but they 
agree in those points which are most important for me to 
notice this morning. All these forms of faith are consistent 



194 



The Religiotis Life. 



with the largest liberty and the noblest morality. But they 
seem to me to fail to meet the other two standards which I 
have set up as rules for judgment. In the first place, they 
dare to limit human intelligence. They advise us to study 
and think about only this little world and this little life of 
ours here on this one planet. They tell us that we can never 
know anything about God, if there is a God, and that it is 
useless for us to speculate about a future, even if there is 
a future, because it does not concern us. But this restless 
thought of man which looks before and after, which wan- 
ders through eternity, refuses to be limited to one world. 
The growing intelligence and mind of man demand the 
universe for a field. And if you set up any limit, and say. 
Beyond that is the unknown, it replies. That is a question to 
be settled by further investigation. We demand leave to 
pass the old limits, and to believe that a thing is unknowable 
only when, after ages of effort, the human mind has failed to 
gain a foothold on that field. Then, again, this human hope 
of ours is not satisfied by any of these forms of secular- 
ism or exclusively this-worldly religion. The hope of the 
human heart will forever follow the track of those who have 
left us and gone out through the mist into the beyond. You 
may talk to a man who has never lost a friend, a man who is 
prosperous in business, who is young or only in middle life, 
who has not begun to think of death, to whom misfortune 
has never come, — you may talk to him, if you will, about 
being contented with what he can see and hear and feel; 
but just so soon as one of our own personal friends has gone 
over to the other side, or so soon as we begin to feel that 
we are growing old and that our days here are fewer and 
fewer, or as trouble or calamity or sorrow comes upon us, we 
begin to wake up to the fact that there is no satisfaction for 
our highest, noblest aspirations here. Man refuses to be 



The Religious Outlook, 



195 



limited to one planet. He looks up to the stars, and finds 
there a hint that possibly there are other lives, possibly a 
higher destiny. He demands at any rate a right to think, to 
dream, to hope, and, if it be possible, to investigate beyond 
the limits of this life. It seems to me, then, plain and pal- 
pable that none of these limited types of belief are going 
permanently to satisfy the human intellect or the human 
heart. 

Let us consider a moment what we in this church are 
claiming to represent, — the general liberal movement of the 
modern world. Is this likely to be permanent .f* In one 
sense, it is, and, in another, not. I do not feel at all sure 
that the dogmas, — for we have them, — the special ideas, the 
institutions which we have developed to-day, are to be per- 
manent. But the one characteristic of liberalism is that 
it is not a dogma hard and fixed. It is not a scheme of 
things ; it is not an institution. It is a movement ; it is a 
method ; it is a life. And just in so far as it is a method 
and a movement, just in so far I believe that it is looking in 
the right direction, and is, therefore, to be permanent. Our 
ideas, our special notions, our pet conceptions, perhaps, may 
pass away ; but the method, the free inquiry, the scientific 
investigation, the devout aspiration, the human help by the 
way, — these are of necessity and in their very nature a part 
of the best that is in man, and so likely to remain so long as 
the heavens and the earth endure. 

What about Christianity as a whole ? Is Christianity to 
be a permanent form of the religious life ? I cannot answer 
that question ; and for the sufficient reason that I do not 
know of any six people, belonging to different forms and 
phases of religious life, who are in any sort of agreement as 
to what Christianity is. When I can find somebody who 
will give me a definition of Christianity that people in differ- 



196 



The Religions Life. 



ent sects and different denominations wi.. accept, then I 
can form some sort of clear and rational judgment as to 
whether that is hkely to survive. Christianity, according to 
the popular definition of to-day, assumes as many different 
forms as the cloud in Hamlet. It is a cloud, or a whale, or 
a weasel, or a camel, according to who looks at it. But, 
instead of this being something against Christianity, I re- 
gard it as the grandest thing about it. If Jesus had formu- 
lated a scheme, if the apostles had elaborated a system, if 
they had turned Christianity into a dogma or an institution, 
as some of the more modern churches have done, then we 
could say with a good deal of assurance, This scheme or 
dogma or institution will not survive. But Jesus is repre- 
sented by the writer of the Gospel of John as having said a 
very profound and significant thing, — " The words that I 
speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." And 
here is the reason why Christianity survives through so 
many changes, and is able to dominate so many civilizations. 
It is as flexible as a river, starting in the mountains, capable 
of flowing through all sorts of soil and all types of landscape 
into the infinite sea. It is spirit and life, not dogma, insti- 
tution, rite, or ceremony. Just in so far as Christianity is 
that, is in accordance with the highest liberty of thought, 
with the highest hope and life, Christianity will survive ; and 
I doubt not that something that shall go by the name of 
Christianity will be held by the intelligent world for hun- 
dreds of years yet in the future ; and all that is true in it, all 
that is divine, human, vital, will live forever under whatever 
name. 

Now, then, it remains for me to do one other thing. I 
shall not be able to point to any special church, any special 
form or institution of religion, and say, I believe that is 
likely to be permanent, to rule the world in the future ; but 



The Religions Outlook. 



197 



we may consider another thing quite as satisfactory. I want 
to ask : What are likely to be the permanent religious wants 
of the most highly developed men in the future ? What are 
likely to remain as religious ideas, hopes, thoughts, institu- 
tions, that are capable of feeding these wants ? 

I believe that, in order that there should be anything that 
can be rightly called religion, the human race must continue 
to think of a Power, infinite and eternal, outside of itself, 
out of which it has come, on which it is dependent, toward 
which it stands in the most intimate relations. I believe 
that man must recognize a law as above him, a law rightly 
controlling his life, to which he must be ready to submit 
intelligently and voluntarily, as a law that has a right to 
control his thought and his action. I believe that there 
must continue some permanent motive power adequate to 
make men obedient to this law; for I believe that men will 
always have this hunger. 

Let me turn to the other side of this question, and, briefly 
as I may, tell you what I believe to be permanent essentials 
in the universe about us. I believe that the time will never 
come when this human race shall cease to believe in an 
infinite and eternal Power, of which all worlds and all life are 
the manifestation, — a Power that was before us and will be 
after us. We have come out of this Power, we are intimately 
related to it, and we are dependent upon it every moment of 
our lives. The law of its life is the law of our lives ; and the 
main motive for keeping that law lies in the fact that keep- 
ing it means life. Keeping this universal and eternal law of 
righteousness means life, physical, mental, moral, spiritual. 
Breaking it means death, complete or partial, according to 
the degree to which that breaking is carried. 

I believe that there will remain, in the highest and 
grandest development of the world, a reason, in the nature 



198 



The Religions Life. 



of things, for the continued existence of the Church, — a vol- 
untary organization of men seeking after the best things, 
looking for the secret of life, trying to live the truth and the 
goodness and the beauty of the world, and help others to 
live it ; that there may remain such rites, ceremonies, and 
services as are vital and as express the real feelings, hopes, 
and aspirations of the race ; that there will remain a reason 
for that prayer which is communion with the infinite Life, and 
that does not seek to change these laws or interfere with 
them ; that there will remain ground for the deepest hope, 
the noblest outlook, for the individual and for the race on 
this planet, and in some at present unknown world. 

I cannot see how any of these by the utmost development 
of the intellectual, the political, the moral life can ever be 
outgrown. It seems to me, therefore, that here we have 
a reason for the permanence of religion not only, but for the 
permanence of all those things connected with the religious 
life which are noblest and sweetest and best. And here 
also is ground for the grandest hope for the future. 



EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY. 



There is, I think, a quite popular impression abroad that 
he who is a consistent believer in the teachings of modern 
science, who adopts the theory of evolution, can no longer 
rationally or logically hold a faith in a future life, or the 
continued existence of the soul after death. My purpose, 
then, this morning, in treating as closely and as carefully as 
I can this theme, will not include a general treatment of the 
subject of immortality. I shall not necessarily tell you all I 
think about it, all I believe, and all I hope. I believe the 
theory of evolution to be, in general, the true theory of the 
world and of the development of life. I wish simply to tell 
you what I think I have a right to believe concerning this 
matter of immortality, while I occupy this stand-point in 
regard to evolution. This, simply and comprehensively, is 
my theme. 

It will be necessary, at the outset, for me to ask, and to 
briefly answer. What is evolution ? The answer of that one 
question alone, if carried to its logical conclusions, would be 
the solution of the problem which we raise. 

Evolution, then, is simply a scientific theory as to the 
methods, the processes, by which the worlds have come to 
their present condition, by which life has developed from its 
lowest, through all the intermediate forms, until it has 
reached man. It is a theory, then, — and that is the point I 
wish to emphasize, — of methods, of processes. It does not 



200 



TJie Religious Life. 



undertake to answer any question concerning ultimate origin 
or ultimate destiny. It leaves that old problem, as to 
the beginning of the universe and its end, where it was 
before. It leaves the question as to the beginning of life, 
its end, its origin, its destiny, where it was before ; or, if not 
quite where it was before, if it throws some light upon it, if 
it gives us hints concerning it, it does not attempt a full, 
complete, and final explanation. It rather teaches that 
these questions are, in their very nature, insoluble, beyond 
the grasp of the human mind ; for the human mind is within 
this universe, and is a product of it. It is, in the nature of 
things, then, absurd for us to suppose that it can go outside 
the universe, and look at it from without and tell when and 
how it began. Indeed, we are compelled to believe that it 
never began ; that, in some way, life, power, always was, 
is now, and ever will be. From the stand-point of evolution, 
then, this is just as true as it was before that wonderful 
inscription was written upon the statue of Isis in ancient 
Egypt : " I am the one that was and is and shall be ; and 
no one has ever lifted my veil." No one ever has lifted it, 
or, perhaps, ever will. Advocates of the scientific theory of 
evolution, at any rate, are not so unwise as to attempt the 
impossible. The question then remains for us, as it does for 
the advocates of the old theory : What is the soul ? When 
did it begin ? By what process did it become connected 
with the body? What is its relation to the physical life? 
Is it distinct from the physical life ? Can it act inde- 
pendently of it? If not, will it continue to be, when the 
physical has gone back to dust ? These questions, I say, 
remain for the evolutionist just as real, as rational ques- 
tions as they were for the believers in the old theology. 

The advocates of the old faith have not been clear on 
these points. Their views have not been harmonious and at 



Evolution and Immortality. 20 r 



one. I am spoken to frequently by men and women who 
seem to suppose that this question as to what the soul is, 
and how and when it became connected with the physical 
life, is a question peculiar to modern science, to evolution. 
They seem to assume that it was no difficulty under the old 
faith, but a natural part of it. 

Let us look at it for a moment. Suppose I open the first 
chapter of Genesis. I read there that the Elohim created 
the body of the first man in their own image, and then 
breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, and that it be- 
came a living soul. But, when we look a little more care- 
fully, we find that this same phrase, " living soul," carries 
with it no special significance concerning the nature and 
destiny of man, because precisely the same phrase is used 
in connection with the various forms of animal life. They 
are spoken of by the writer of Genesis as possessing this 
living soul in precisely the same way that Adam himself is. 
So the difficulty pertained to the old theology just as much 
as it does to the new ideas of the modern world. We find, 
from the history of the Church, that there has been no end 
of discussion concerning this question as to the nature and 
origin of the soul and how it is related to the physical life. 

There have been three great theories, with reference to 
this, that it is worth while for us to look at. There have 
been those that believed in the pre-existence of the soul ; 
that it is, in its nature, eternal, not only destined to exist in 
an endless future, but as having already existed in an end- 
less past. The old difficulty attaches to this theory — to 
understand how this soul becomes incarnated, incorporated 
in the body. 

There is another type of belief, that which is called 
technically Traducianism ; that is, it is the belief of those 
that hold that the soul of man is derived from his parents by 



202 



The Religious Life. 



the process of natural generation, just the same as is the 
body. 

There is another theory, that of Creationism ; that is, 
that God especially creates a new soul every time that a new 
being is born into the world. 

I mention these simply to make clear to you that this 
difficulty as to what the soul is and where it comes from, and 
how it gets incarnated, is not any new difficulty that modern 
science is specially called upon to answer. It is a difficulty 
as old as human thought. And it is just as insoluble on the 
old theory as it is on the new. I wish thus to show that 
this is not any new or added difficulty with which we are 
specially called on to deal. 

But there is another point which is frequently raised ; and 
those who make it seem to think they are raising a good and 
insuperable objection to the rationality of any faith in the 
future life. They tell us that, when once we have granted 
the fact that man is derived by natural descent from animal 
forms, that we are bound logically to accept one of two 
positions, — either that all the animals are also immortal in 
their nature or else that man, who is naturally derived from 
them, is not. 

Now, I will say to you very frankly that, even if we were 
compelled to be impaled upon one or the other of the horns 
of this dilemma, it would not trouble me in the least. At 
the same time, I wish to say just as frankly that I see 
no necessity of my accepting either of them. In the first 
place, there are large numbers of rational, and some even 
of scientific, people, who are earnest advocates of the 
doctrine of the natural immortality of animals. It would 
not trouble me one whit, if I found myself compelled to 
accept that belief. Indeed, I have had, now and then, such 
tender, devoted friends among the inhabitants of the animal 



Evolution and Immortality. 



203 



world that it would be to me even a great delight if I could 
hold that faith of the simple Indian, as Alexander Pope pict- 
ures him, dreaming of that far-off future when " his faithful 
dog shall bear him company." I have known many a dog, 
many a horse, that seemed to me, if goodness and service and 
merit are to come into this discussion, to deserve continued 
existence much more than many a man I have known. 
And, if I could have my choice as to future company, I 
would gladly leave out some of the men I have met, and take 
some of the animals in their place. But I do not see any 
logical necessity for such an alternative. Man is differen- 
tiated from all forms of animal life in one very significant 
particular. Man has developed a conscious personality, 
which we look on as the essence of that which we call soul ; 
and there is not, so far as I am aware, any proof that any 
animal, however sagacious, however highly developed, has 
ever attained anything even approaching to this. If I should 
find any manifestation of this in the lower forms of life, I 
should look upon it with as much amazement and wonder as 
I now look upon its manifestation in the human world. 

Suppose, for example, that I should find out that some 
noble dog had risen to the point of thinking, " I am a dog ; 
and outside of me is a mysterious, wonderful world, out of 
which, in some strange way, I have come." And suppose 
he should begin to wonder : What am I ? Whence did I 
come ? For what destiny am I intended ? And suppose, sit- 
ting beside some dying companion, he should raise the ques- 
tion : Is this the end ? Is it possible that this stiff, cold form 
beside me is all ; or was there something contained in this 
body, connected with it for a time, that had in it the essence 
of a life not dependent on this fleeting breath ? Is it 
possible that there is a spiritual dog that survives the death 
of the body, that continues to exist, to care, to love, to 



204 



The Religions Life. 



progress in some other sphere ? Suppose, I say, that it 
should come to the knowledge of the scientific world that 
such a course of reasoning as this had been gone through 
with on the part of any member of the animal world, would 
we not be compelled to at once revise our definition of the 
word "animal," and to raise as a rational question precisely 
the same one that confronts us here this morning? It 
seems to me, then, that it is not only true that there are no 
new difficulties confronting us as scientific students and 
believers in the doctrine of evolution, but that we may find 
here, in the highest and best results of modern science, 
several very important hints that will well repay our most 
careful attention. I shall not attempt to go over all of them, 
but simply concentrate my attention on one or two that I 
regard as of chiefest significance. 

If any man comes with a theory that he is ready to pro- 
pound as an adequate explanation of the world, we must 
demand of him, at any rate, that it be competent to ex- 
plain the most important facts. 

Suppose a man should come before the world to-day with 
a new astronomical theory, a theory intended to explain the 
development of suns and planets, and moons and asteroids, — 
a theory that should attempt to account for their relative 
size and position, their movements in the heavens and in 
regard to each other. And suppose that, while the theory 
was adequate to the explanation of some few minor, subor- 
dinate facts, it utterly failed and broke down, when it was 
confronted with the most important ones of all. You would 
say at once that the theory had no rational standing ground, 
and that a wise man would be justified in brushing it one 
side as unworthy of attention. 

Just precisely that do I say concerning all forms of the 
theory of materialism as they are propounded to us by their 



Evolutiofi and Immortality. 



205 



eloquent advocates in the modern world. Here are two 
great facts in human consciousness, self-conscious person- 
ality and thought. Any theory of man or of the universe 
that fails to explain these is thereby proved to be utterly in- 
adequate. It breaks down in the presence of the very things 
that are highest and that most need explanation. Material- 
ism, then, tried by this test, I regard as bad science, as 
false philosophy. Put to the highest test, it utterly fails. It 
cannot even approximate an explanation of the fact that I 
think, that I remember, that I hope. 

According to all the laws of physical force with which we 
are acquainted, the physical life might go on, and mind be 
left utterly out of account. It is indeed true that my think- 
ing is correlated with certain molecular motions of brain 
particles ; but the motions of the brain particles do not pro- 
duce thought, nor explain it. Cabanis said that the brain 
secreted thought, in just the same way that the liver secretes 
bile. The best modern science declares any such statement 
as that to be insufferable nonsense. If you could trace the 
motion of the very minutest particle of the brain from the 
time when the blood carried it there from the heart to the 
time when it was thrown out again as waste and worn ; if you 
could trace every motion of these particles in all their near 
and remote effects, you would not have approached an ex- 
planation of thought, of the fact that it exists, or its nature. 
For all these physical processes can be traced and explained 
in the light of the law of the persistence of force ; and 
thought is outside of them all. This self-conscious person- 
ality of mind is something that the best modern science de- 
clares it cannot explain. It is not a part of this physical 
life of mine ; it is not the product of physical force ; it is 
not a link in any physical chain. 
,What is it, then.? The result of the teaching of science, 



2o6 



The Religious Life. 



though negative, is at least a hint that it may be something 
not dependent on physical organization, and that may not 
cease to be when the physical organization is taken apart. 

There is one more truth wrought out and illustrated as the 
result of modern science. We see in the world processes, 
of which we are a part, — beginning millions of years in the 
past, — we see life by slow steps of progress rising grade 
after grade. First the physical forces predominate. Then 
life is ruled by the intellect, as cunning or as reason. Then 
slowly emerging, we see what is called the moral idea or 
moral sense of man, — love, goodness, hope, these things that 
pertain to the spiritual ideal of the race. We see this ra- 
tional process, or progress, through the ages, until the world 
that began as brute becomes human, and that which was 
merely physical or intellectual becomes dominated by ideals 
like those of Jesus of Nazareth, than whose there is not a 
mightier name on earth to-day. We see the spiritual coming 
to the front. And yet, as I have traced it, we are conscious 
of the fact that we are only in the midst of the process. It 
is not yet complete : it reaches out with promise toward the 
future. Promise of what? Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive 
what ; but something, something grander than to-day, or else 
the universe stultifies itself. 

We see then, and we are a part of, a rational process of 
progress through the ages. Do you say we have no right to 
call this process a rational one, no right to assume any- 
thing concerning this mysterious progression ? 

Let us see. These reasons with which we assume to 
measure things are products of this universe, whichever 
theory about it you take. Reason has come out of and is 
the product of the universe. If, then, reason is not compe- 
tent to decide a question like this, it may be that the 



Evolution and Immortality. 



207 



universe is only created as a sport of fancy. If reason it- 
self is not reliable, why, then, your argument breaks down, 
because the decision to which you rationally come is irra- 
tional, or may be itself an irrational decision. If, how- 
ever, the reason is reliable, if we can trust its decisions con- 
cerning a great problem like this, then one of two things 
follows : either the universe itself, of which it is a product, 
is rational, or else the universe has produced something that 
is higher and nobler than itself, which is absurd ; for no 
stream can rise higher than its source. It seems to me, then, 
that we are justified, on the basis of modern science and in 
the light of the strictest logic, to advance and hold fast the 
conclusion that this process of which we are a part in the 
universe means some grand outcome that shall justify it all. 

I cannot think that we shall end in naught ; 
That the abyss shall be the grave of thought ; 

That e'er oblivion's shoreless sea shall roll 
O'er love and wonder and the lifeless soul. 

It seems to me, in other words, the very height of unreason 
to suppose that this age-long process of the development of 
the universe is to end at last in a grand consummation of 
nothing. That would be the most stupendous reductio ad ab- 
surdum. If the universe means anything, and we can trace 
a rational process from ages ago up to the present, it is only 
rational to suppose that this process will go on to something 
higher and better yet ; and it is only putting it mildly to say 
that we are justified in hoping the grandest things for the 
future. 

Now, then, we have reached this point. We have no 
quarrel with the man who cannot possibly see any force in 
reasoning like this. His mind may be constituted differ- 



208 



TJie Religious Life. 



ently from mine ; and I cannot dogmatically say that my 
mind is the measure of the universe or even the standard 
for his. But this much I can say, and say it in the face of 
all the world: there is no modern knowledge, no modern 
science, no modern authority of any kind, that has the slight- 
est right to charge me with being irrational or unscientific, 
if I hold fast this grand hope of a personal immortality. I 
have then a right to stand here, and, with a gleam of joy 
and trust in my eyes, hope for that v/hich is as yet invisible. 

Now, then, occupying this stand-point, let me hint to you 
two or three things that seem to me perhaps worthy of your 
attention. 

I. I wish to recall to you a wonder of human nature par- 
allel to that which I suggested a moment ago as a supposi- 
tion concerning some member of the animal world. Did 
you ever attempt to measure the mighty significance of the 
fact that men have had a universal belief, a daring hope of 
a future life ? If there is no reason for it, if it is not true, 
how comes it that such a daring, magnificent delusion ever 
entered the human soul ? The universe, so far as we are 
acquainted with it, is not accustomed to lie to us. It gen- 
erally gives what it promises ; and, when a longing in any 
department of our nature is felt, it generally indicates some 
source of supply. Are we to suppose that, in the highest 
illustration of this hunger, it is only a delusion, a mirage, a 
cheat, the most stupendous cheat of a universe that thus 
becomes false all the way through ? Just consider the fact, 
and think how marvellous it is. There never has lived on 
this earth a single human being, or creature of any kind, 
except those that still remain, and who look forward to the 
same destiny, that has not died. And yet, in the face of 
this universal fate, think of this frail child of the ages daring 
to stand up and look death in the face and defy it, saying : 



EvoliLtion and Immortality. 



" I do not believe thou art real : thou art only the shadow. 
Life is mightier than thou art ; and I will yet triumph over 
all thy power ! " Just think of the significance of an act 
like that ! Think of a man standing by the grave of a 
friend, ready to lower the coffin into the earth and cover it 
over and leave it, knowing that it is only a matter of time 
when he himself shall be put there too, yet daring to look 
down into it, and say : " I do not believe it is a grave : it is 
only a cradle. It means a new birth and a grander start 
than the old." 

2. The belief in a future life has the field; and it has a 
logical, legal, rational right to hold the field, until it is 
logically, legally, or rationally driven out. And I know of 
no power manifested in the ancient or modern world that 
has any right to tell this hope of man that it shall vacate its 
position. It has the field. 

3. On any theory of the universe that you choose to hold, 
our moral intuitions, our moral sense, our ethical ideas, are 
the outcome and development of the universe. And what 
do they tell us ? They say to us over and over again — it is 
an echo from the farthest past, an echo that comes up and 
rings itself anew in the ears of every generation — that 
this world is not a field where complete justice is done, 
where an ideal righteousness is attained. While the ethical 
thought of man declares that righteousness does exist 
somewhere, and that it ought to rule and shall rule, as a 
matter of fact it does not in this world. I cannot help 
admitting that there is an immense logical — yea, evidential 
— force in the argument which is advanced in favor of 
a continued existence, in order that the unevenness of things 
here may somewhere and somehow be righted. Theodore 
Parker used to say that he never believed so firmly in 
immortality as he did when looking in the face of a little 



2IO 



The Religioits Life. 



vice-produced and vice-taught child, ragged and outcast in 
the streets. As he looked upon that face, with no con- 
ception of moral ideals, and thought of its origin and 
destiny, he felt that the child had a right to demand that it 
have a chance, — a chance which this life does not furnish. 
The completed result does not seem to be reached here. 

If I stand on the banks of a river on some foggy morning, 
when the mist is so thick that I cannot see more than thirty 
or forty feet away, and I see at my feet an abutment and the 
arch of a bridge, springing, reaching out, until it is lost 
to sight, I feel logically, rationally warranted in assuming 
that my vision is not the measure of it, that it reaches over 
and finds another abutment, and rests securely on the other 
side. So, when I see the unfinished arch of justice and 
righteousness springing here at my feet, reaching out 
through the mist, incomplete, my logical reason demands 
that I believe that it is somewhere complete, that the ideal 
demand is satisfied. 

4. You will not all, perhaps, receive the next point from 
my lips without question or possible mental protest ; but I 
say, as frankly and fearlessly as I have been accustomed 
for years to utter what I believe, — for I have never yet 
learned the art of concealing my opinions,— that there are 
tvv^o or three v^^onderful properties of this human soul, or 
mind, or whatever name you choose to call it by, that seem 
to me demonstrated, and at the same time to contain sug- 
gestions of immense significance. 

I believe, for example, three things concerning the human 
mind : — 

I. I believe that class of phenomena which is named mes- 
merism or hypnotism — the power of one mind under cer- 
tain conditions to control not only another mind, but 
another body, and physical movements through that mind 



[ 



EvoliLtion a?td Immortality. 



211 



— is no longer questionable, but proved. Not that all re- 
ported cases are true, but that it contains a truth that is 
demonstrated. 

2. I consider that there are many well-authenticated cases 
of clairvoyance, or that which goes by that name, and that it 
is no longer rational to doubt this power of the human mind. 
If any man tells me that he does not believe it, I cannot 
help thinking that in this particular he is not a well-instructed 
person. 

3. I believe in what the London Psychical Society has 
come to call telepathy, or the power of mind under some 
circumstances to influence other minds at a distance, with- 
out any physical contact or any of the ordinary means of 
communication. 

These do not prove anything, you will say. I make no 
claim for them beyond the fact, except as to what they sug- 
gest. They do suggest a good deal more independence of 
this ordinary physical organization of ours, on the part of 
the soul, than we are accustomed to take for granted." 

I am reminded by this fact of an anecdote of Emerson. 
It is said that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Parker were walking in 
Concord one day, when a wild advocate of second advent- 
ism met them, and announced to them in an excited man- 
ner that the world was coming to an end on a special day. 
Mr. Emerson replied in his calm, quiet way : " Well, suppose 
the world does come to an end : it would not trouble me 
any. I think I can get on without it." 

And so, when I find this marvellous human mind of ours, 
this soul, able to do these wondrous things while still con- 
nected with the body, it raises the question, at least, whether 
in the last resort the soul cannot afford to say of the body, 
as Mr. Emerson did of the world, — "I think I can get on 
without it." 



212 



The Religions Life. 



Here then we stand. Human science is utterly unable to 
disprove this old age-long, world-wide belief in an immortal 
life. It has the field. It is a logical, rational belief. We 
may not as yet be able to demonstrate it. I certainly am 
not able to. But, at the same time, I am not quite ready to 
concede, what some scientists claim, that it never can be 
demonstrated. I do not know. I shall give up the hope that 
it may be only when it is proved that it cannot be demon- 
strated. It is not as yet. And so I will but hope that some 
day we may be able to demonstrate that death is what I be- 
lieve it to be, a shadow ; and that life is the grand reality. 
In any case then, we have a right to cherish this grand 
hope, to be comforted through it, to be lifted by it in the 
vicissitudes of life, to take it as balm for our bleeding hearts 
when we stand in the presence of the death of those we 
love. In the words of Campbell, I believe we are entitled 
to say : — 

" Eternal Hope ! when yonder spheres sublime 
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of Time 
Thy joyous youth began, — but not to fade. 
When rapt in fire the realms of ether glow, 
And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below, 
Thou, undismayed, shalt o'er the ruins smile, 
And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile." 





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